Famous biomedics investigate how to extend human life…
I know and I wish you luck. But there is a big difference between extending life and making that life that we have already extended worth living.
Nobel Prize winner Yamanaka, Izpisúa and Serrano have signed for Bezos’ Altos Lab.
I wish you the best in that scientific challenge; But to me, as a doctor, oncologist and hematologist, I am more interested in the second challenge: making human life, which is already longer than it has ever been, worth it.
Isn’t it the same scientific problem: extending life and making it worth it?
It is not at all, although today they tend to be confused. I research to understand the process of living longer with dignity: with autonomy, full consciousness…
Why isn’t quality the same biomedical problem as simply extending life?
There has been a worrying shift in the biomedical race towards investigating longevity without linking it to quality of life and it is a mistake.
Because?
Can we extend life with dignity?
¿…?
When I study patients who survive cancer or cardiovascular disease…
They are still our great killers.
Many who have been cured later succumb to neurodegenerative diseases; failures in their cellular regeneration, which make them lose that autonomy, that dignity…
What do you suggest, doctor?
That it is not about making us live longer, like they are making a worm live, in a laboratory.
Isn’t that a start?
I propose that we investigate humans who are already 102 years old today, there are many, and see their functions and autonomy and then think about what the life of someone who is 140 would actually be like.
It’s still hard to imagine.
Because for that 140-year-old person to live with dignity, the entire society would have to be rethought and not just scale the results of a laboratory experiment. And I see that progress is being made, yes, in making a human live longer; but not so much in ensuring that we live more with dignity. And that is no longer just a biomedical question.
But it is still one of the most transcendental things we can do.
Atul Gawande has explained it very well: we cannot be made to live longer at the cost of giving up a dignified life. And it is the line of some researchers with whom I share objectives: first to give quality to the years we already live; Then we’ll see if we can lengthen them without losing it.
How do you investigate along those lines?
I see myself as a medical engineer: I design medicines and now I collaborate with scientists here in Barcelona to develop T-cell therapies…
For what diseases?
For cancer and other similar ailments of cellular degeneration. And I am also manufacturing those cells in India.
As?
It is cellular therapy that we practice in my team. We just published it in an article. We have discovered a population of stem cells that grow cartilage and bone.
To cure what?
They cure osteoarthritis, for example, which is very common among women of a certain age. And thus we serve the objective of helping to age with dignity.
And won’t that also lengthen their lives?
That question shows what I was telling you. I distrust the almost daily longevity announcements. I don’t believe them. Maybe there is some sign of progress, but there is too much noise for the few nuts demonstrated.
What would you do to improve our lives?
The first thing was to reach a global pact that would supervise all of humanity in real time to control pandemics. The last one was humiliating and it is even more so that we still do not have that network to control viruses.
If they didn’t grow them for war, it would be progress: did covid come out of the laboratory?
I think it was not a biological weapon, but it could have escaped from a laboratory or simply been an evolutionary accident. And I won’t say more, because I am not an epidemiologist.
Is the WHO of no use to us?
He already proved that not in the last pandemic. Right now there is an avian flu alarm, but we still do not have reliable real-time information on its evolution. Sees it?
Are there already unused means today for the global control of viruses and pandemics?
Of course: there are terabytes of information and platforms that could exercise that control. I have spoken with those in charge, who explain to me how alarms go off when millions of people search for the same symptoms on the internet.
