James Clement conducts research into anti-aging technologies. He has studied people over 110 years of age and has found a strong genetic connection to their super long lives. Yet, periodic environmental signals such as fasting and certain dietary supplements will prompt human cells to effectively cleanse themselves and recycle materials for energy. This causes cells, and thus bodies, to live longer. This episode was originally released on September 25, 2019.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles, we'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:39

I'm going to live forever as a song from the musical fame, and if only that were true, but it turns out we can slow down some of the effects of aging and here to join me in my time machine thought capsule is, James Clemett, the CEO of Better Humans, a company that conducts research into longevity, disease prevention, and general human enhancement. Welcome to Radio Cade, James.

James Clemett: 1:00

Thank you, glad to be here.

Richard Miles: 1:01

So James, I'm not going to make you sing any songs from any hip musicals, probably to your relief, but I would like to have you start out by defining for us what anti-aging technologies are and what they actually do. And I'm going to ask my very first follow on question. Does this mean that we can live longer? Or does it mean we aren't afflicted by the normal conditions that apply to aging people?

James Clemett: 1:23

So the answer is yes to both of those things. We actually have longer living healthier people amongst us right now. I spent the last 10 years studying supercentenarians, and have met many women and men 106 , seven, eight years and older, all the way up to Morano in Italy who's 117 who are still cogent, living by themselves, often cooking their own food, and cleaning their own homes. One gentleman at 109 had just driven from the Tucson area to Denver in a sports car for his daughter's 80 something of birthday, a remarkable a feat for any elderly person, but at 109, amazing. So my initial quest was to figure out how these people live so long, how they do so in really great shape, and then to see what can we learn from that and apply to the rest of us who aren't so lucky.

Richard Miles: 2:17

So James, I'll just ask a kind of a nerdy social science question. It sounds like there are enough supercentenarians so people not just a hundred, but a hundred what?

James Clemett: 2:25

110.

Richard Miles: 2:26

Okay. Are there enough of that population to study and make valid conclusions that study this?

James Clemett: 2:32

That's sort of debatable. Okay. So my mentor, George Church, one of the top geneticists in the United States, he's at Harvard Medical School, he believes that you can discover rare phenotypes from even in of one . So a single person compared to everyone else's genetics, you can tease out what the differences might be. And certainly in a small family, brothers and sisters and mom and dad, et cetera, that haven't don't have a similar phenotype. Th