It's a great pleasure to be here in Berkeley on a beautiful morning with Dr. Scott Grayson, one of the great luminaries in our field. Good morning Scott.

Good morning Paul. Pleasure to be here.

Perhaps if I could start with the obvious; could you say a few words about your background and the positions that you hold today?

Sure. I was originally trained not as a biologist, but as a computer scientist, and I did computer science research in industry for 6 or 7 years, during which I met my beautiful wife, who was at the time a senior professor at the University of Washington, and through her I, first of all through informal means, learned a lot of biology. And then I realized that the field of gerontology was being massively under-invested in; it was really a backwater. So I started making contributions there, some of which I think were pretty good, and then one thing led to another, and now I'm running an institute

MATS

That's right, MATS, the Metabolic Aging Therapeutics Studies institute, to see what we can do to prevent and really stop aging. And I think, with some of the understanding we have of metabolism and of bioelectricity, we're really on the path to ending aging in our lifetime.

Wow

I really do believe the first person to live to 1000 is alive today.

Okay, so tell me more first about bioelectricity, and then we can get into how bioelectricity and metabolism interact.

Great. So traditionally, really until the last twenty years, biologists looked at either the structure of an individual cell, or at the structure of some macro-scale feature like a tissue or an organ or an organism, but the mechanism of how cells became organs was largely a mystery. That's where the study of bioelectricity, bioelectrical signaling comes in. Bioelectrical signaling is how cells organize themselves into "cellular collectives", like tissues and organs. And we can really see that happening, using some of the new instruments and computational tools we've developed. And more than that we can actually influence that signaling; we can influence what messages are sent.

That's what you're doing with MRI.

That's right. We can use magnetic resonance to read the electrical signals being sent between the cells, but by using the MRI machine to create standing waves we can actually induce those signals as well, and that's a tool that allows us to go in and actually change what signals cells are sending to each other.

And that's what you're using to 3D print organs

That's part of what we're using to 3D print organs, yes. Really what we're 3D printing is a scaffold for the organ to grow on. Think of vines growing on a trellis. But of course the cells you're starting with need to want to grow into a functioning organ. Even if the cells are situated in the right places if they don't get the right bioelectrical signals they won't perform the functions of an organ as opposed to, say, a slab of fat tissue that has the same shape. And so that's where our work on bioelectricity comes in.

And so how is that going? When can I buy a new kidney? haha

I can't really get into specifics but we hope to have something to announce in the beginning of next year.

Great, looking forward to it. And what about metabolism?

So aging is simply the accumulation of damage in the body, and the number one cause of that damage is metabolism. The faster the cells in the body act the more damage they accumulate. So one of the things that we're most interested in is controlling the rate of metabolism, but doing it in a way that has cells continue to perform their functions, or at least to where we can put them to sleep and then when they wake back up they go back to performing those functions again. And it turns out that manipulating bioelectrical signals is a way to do that. You can use those signals to put a cell in a state where it basically doesn't think anything is going on and it goes to sleep.

That's what you did with the world's oldest mouse, right?

That's right. We have a mouse that's over seven years old, which we achieved by lowering its metabolism in this way.

That's very exciting.

Yes. Another application we have for this technology is organ transplants. We talked about the 3D printed organs before, but of course those organs are no good if they take so long to make that the patient dies before it's ready. And so we're using our bioelectrical signaling technology to lower the metabolism of organs to a level where they can be stored virtually indefinitely in a small bioreactor. And then we can use the same technology to sort of convince the patient's body to accept the new organ, even though it doesn't have the same genome. Because obviously we won't know who the patient will be when we produce the organ. We have a spinout that's working, with funding from the Fortune family

The Halcyon founder

Right. We're working to commercialize that and we're really making great progress.

That's great. Well hurry up, I'm not getting any younger haha