Mortality

Summary

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Radiolab: "Mortality" (June 14, 2007) — Detailed Summary

Episode Overview

In this episode, Radiolab takes on the profound and universal topic of mortality—why living things die, the biological reasons behind aging and death, and how different cultures and species grapple with life’s endpoint. The hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, explore the science of cellular aging, the story of the Hayflick limit, genetic discoveries on lifespan, societal consequences of longevity, and the intimate experience of dying within a family. The episode weaves together investigative journalism, compelling storytelling, and signature inventive sound design to offer an exploration that is scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal.

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Key Topics & Discussion Points

1. The Biology of Death: Cellular Limits and the Hayflick Discovery

Segment Outline:

• Introduction to Mortality
  • Jad and Robert open by pondering the inevitability of death and wonder if it's truly necessary (00:20).
• Meeting Leonard Hayflick (Biologist) in His Garage
  • Leonard Hayflick introduces the hosts to vials of frozen human cells stored in his garage, explaining their historical significance in the study of cellular aging (00:47–02:10).

Key Insight:

• Cell Culturing and Historical Breakthroughs

  • Hayflick recounts how, in the 1950s, biology was mystified by cell culture. Alexis Carrel famously claimed to keep cells alive indefinitely, giving rise to the dogma of "cellular immortality."
  • Quote:
    “It was thought that cells are immortal. Under the proper conditions, they’ll grow indefinitely.”
    — Leonard Hayflick (06:42)

• Hayflick’s Accidental Discovery

  • While tracking batches of fetal cells to avoid contamination, Hayflick observes they eventually stop dividing—contradicting scientific consensus.
  • The realization: It was not external radiation or environment causing senescence; the limit was internal (13:34).
  • The "Hayflick limit" is established: Normal human cells can only divide about 50 times before dying (14:45).

• Breakthrough in Understanding How Cells "Count"

  • Russian scientist Alexei Olovnikov theorizes that DNA contains buffer segments (telomeres) that shorten with each cell division, and when exhausted, trigger cell death (19:02).

Notable Quote:

• "Somewhere in the cell, there's a counter...when the cell gets to 50 divisions...stop. 50 is the magic number."
  — Jad Abumrad (14:13)
• "What does that tell you? Tells you that cells remember. They have a memory."
  — Leonard Hayflick (18:03)

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2. The Genetics of Lifespan: Can We Live Longer?

Segment Outline:

• Manipulating Cellular Immortality

  • Can we push the Hayflick limit? Hayflick explains the enzyme telomerase can extend the dividing capacity of cells, but with major risks (20:31–21:30).
  • The caveat: “95% of all tumors contain telomerase, which normal cells do not...”
    — Leonard Hayflick (21:11)

• Other Species and Lifespans

  • Some animals, like Galapagos tortoises and lobsters, have much higher or indefinite division limits. Lobsters, for example, seem to not age visibly at all (22:21–23:08).

• Genetic Experiments with Worms (Cynthia Kenyon)

  • Cynthia Kenyon from UCSF discovers that by altering a single gene (DAF2) in C. elegans worms, their lifespan can be doubled, and with further tweaks, raised sixfold (24:28–31:16).
  • The interplay of “grim reaper” and “fountain of youth” genes determines aging (27:26, 29:14).

Memorable Quotes:

• "If we change this one gene called daf2, then the worms live twice as long..."
  — Cynthia Kenyon (26:49)
• "The worm has a gene in it that’s shortening the worm’s lifespan, which is why she calls it the Grim Reaper gene."
  — Robert Krulwich (28:36)

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3. The Social Consequences of Longevity: Aging Societies

Segment Outline:

• Case Study: Japan’s Aging Demographics

  • Journalist Jocelyn Ford explores Japan, where the elderly make up 21% of the population and the birth rate is dropping (32:58–35:02).
  • Cultural issues: Elderly care is stretching families thin, as the younger generation shrinks.
  • Importing care: Japan reluctantly considers foreign caregivers and automation (robots), reflecting resistance to outside help and deep-rooted values about being a burden (36:01–41:51).

• Innovative and Robotic Solutions

  • The episode visits nursing homes pioneering robot caregivers like Paro the seal, providing companionship and reducing stigma for elders needing help (41:53–44:19).

• Intergenerational Connections

  • Experiments placing nursing homes alongside preschools inject vitality into elders’ lives, although the sustainability is questioned due to demographic trends (44:57).

Notable Moment:

• “I think for anybody in any society...that is a difficult thing to have to ask somebody [to wash or diaper you].”
  — Host/Reporter (41:51)

• “People might actually be able to engineer compassion, engineer companionship. But then I started asking...would you feel comfortable with a robot taking care of you?”
  — Host/Reporter (44:26)

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4. Dying Up Close: Family, Care, and Witness

Segment Outline:

• Personal Narrative: The Zagar Family
  • Artist Isaiah Zagar and his son, filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar, record the dying days of their father/grandfather through photography—a form of coming to terms with mortality and caregiving (48:01–55:16).
  • Isaiah provokes Jeremiah into a “contest” to photograph their dying relative, drawing the younger generation into active participation and honest confrontation with death’s realities.

Memorable Quotes:

• “One of my modes of understanding was either drawing or photographing.”
  — Isaiah Zagar (49:08)
• “You have the camera. I mean, that’s how you cope. Otherwise, you’re sitting with him and he’s just looking at you.” — Jeremiah Zagar (50:38)
• “When a person is dying, it’s very important that they’re surrounded...by the light of life. And you don’t go into the place of oblivion alone.” — Isaiah Zagar (54:42)

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Timeline of Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment & Topic | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:20 | Hosts introduce mortality & interview with Hayflick begins | | 06:42 | The immortal chicken heart & scientific dogma on aging | | 13:34 | Hayflick’s discovery: The internal cellular “clock” | | 14:45 | The “Hayflick limit” explained | | 18:03 | Cellular memory and freezing cells | | 20:31 | Role of telomerase, cellular immortality versus cancer risk | | 24:28 | Cynthia Kenyon & genetic manipulation of worm lifespan | | 29:14 | The battle of “grim reaper” and “fountain of youth” genes | | 32:58 | Jocelyn Ford on Japan’s aging society | | 41:42 | Robots and innovative solutions for elder care | | 44:57 | Intergenerational living and reflections on the future | | 48:01 | Personal narrative: Zagar family & photographing death | | 54:42 | Reflection: The importance of company and compassion at death|

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Memorable Quotes

• On Scientific Discovery:
  “So the tradeoff for cellular immortality, at least in this case, is cancer.”
  — Jad Abumrad (21:30)

• On Aging and Death:
  "When a person is dying, it’s very important that they’re surrounded...by the light of life. And you don’t go into the place of oblivion alone."
  — Isaiah Zagar (54:42)

• On Cultural Shifts:
  “People might actually be able to engineer compassion, engineer companionship.”
  — Host/Reporter (44:26)

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Episode Tone and Style

The episode balances curiosity, scientific rigor, irreverence, and emotional candor. Jad and Robert converse with both playfulness and gravitas, bringing listeners along as they unpack both cutting-edge biology and the ancient human drama of life and loss. The sound design is immersive, punctuating the narrative with humor, wonder, and moments of poignant silence.

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Conclusion

"Mortality" is a wide-ranging investigation into why we die, what governs how long organisms live, the societal consequences of changing lifespans, and what it means to face death—both abstractly and in the flesh. Whether examining cells under a microscope, tinkering with the genetics of worms, analyzing policy in aging societies, or sitting with family in a dying man’s room, Radiolab crafts a moving, multidimensional portrait of mortality.

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For further exploration visit:
Radiolab.org

Transcript

[Host/Reporter]

You're listening to Radiolab from New York Public Radio.

[Jad Abumrad]

Public Radio, WNYCNYC and npr. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

And I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

And this is Radiolab.

[Robert Krulwich]

You ever wondered why it is that all living things die?

[Jad Abumrad]

I do wonder about that, actually. It keeps me up at night.

[Robert Krulwich]

Which always leads me to the next question. Do we have to? Do I have to?

[Jad Abumrad]

The topic of our show, as a matter of fact, and the natural place to begin to look for an answer, is in a garage. So here we are in your garage.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Here we are in my garage.

[Jad Abumrad]

The owner of this particular garage is one Leonard Hayflick. He is a biologist.

[Leonard Hayflick]

First of all, for historical reasons, he.

[Jad Abumrad]

Takes me to the corner where he's got this. Wow. So describe what we're looking at here.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Well, what we're looking at is a barrel shaped device.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's a metal canister that is shaped kind of like a thermos, except bigger. So I'm opening the lid, he twists off the top and whoosh.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Wow, look at that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Out comes all of this smoke. Dry ice from Halloween is what it looks like.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Well, this liquid nitrogen is used in a lot of movies.

[Jad Abumrad]

He reaches his hand into the liquid nitrogen, nitrogen fog, right into the bowels of this canister and pulls out. And this is what I'd come to see. Those are what we call what, some test tubes.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Tubes in which these answers are kept.

[Jad Abumrad]

Admittedly, they're not much to look at, but if you know what's in there, it's almost holy. Each tube has millions of frozen human cells in there, and these cells have completely changed how we think about mortality and immortality. And you keep it in your garage?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why? I mean, I think it's pretty cool, but why? Why?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Because nobody will think of looking here.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, okay. Well, I won't. I certainly won't divulge your address or.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Anything, but please don't tell anybody.

[Jad Abumrad]

No, of course I wouldn't. But it's in California is all I'll say.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Well, where else would you want me to put it? In my bedroom?

[Jad Abumrad]

No, I don't know. I mean, it's. I imagine something like this, you would find it in the middle. Started for Leonard Hayflick about 50 years ago. I got the backstory. Actually, not in California, in Philly. Sound check. Do you want to tell me where we are?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Well, we're sitting on the 12th floor of the William Penn House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which happens to be my mother's apartment, who has just celebrated her 100th birthday.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just that day, appropriately enough. In any case, let's rewind to the 50s. Biology was facing a problem. Basic problem. How do you study human cells? Cells are us. It is what we are. But you can't exactly put a microscope up to your wrist. Well, you know, I guess you could.

[Leonard Hayflick]

But I wouldn't say it's impossible.

[Jad Abumrad]

But it's certainly highly impractical what you can do instead. And Hayflick was among the first to perfect this is. Well, he explained it to me.

[Leonard Hayflick]

If I take a tiny biopsy from any part of your anatomy that you're willing to surrender to me, like, say.

[Jad Abumrad]

A fleck of my wrist, your wrist, anywhere you want.

[Leonard Hayflick]

The tip of your nose, the tip of your toe. I don't care where it is. And then you ra a pyramid of skin by grabbing onto the tip of a hair. Pull it up, and then with the other hand, you take a sterile scalpel and whack the tip of that pyramid of skin off. And I drop it into a test tube and I introduce an enzyme preparation called trypsin. And that material dissolves the cement that holds all the cells together. Think of your tissue as a brick wall. And once I drop that brick wall into my test tube, I need to dissolve the mortar.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right?

[Leonard Hayflick]

And now I have your individual cells. And if I feed them and treat them nicely, they will divide. Each cell will produce two cells. Each cell will produce two cells. Two cells. Two cells. If you do the math, you'll find that they'll cover the city of New York in about three weeks.

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, you know, that's if you had a big enough petri dish. In any case, this process, it's called cell culturing, is the simplest thing in the world these days. I mean, modern biologists can do it with their eyes closed. But back in Hayflick's day in the 50s, it was very fuzzy because no one really understood the mechanics of it. No one knew exactly what a cell liked or. Or what it didn't like. And so the people that were really good at getting the cells to divide from two into four, into eight and 16, whatever, yes, they. It was like they had the touch.

[Leonard Hayflick]

They had what was called a green thumb.

[Jad Abumrad]

There was a mystique about them because, you know, don't forget this was the early days. Biology.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Cell biology at that time was still.

[Jad Abumrad]

Kind of a black art.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Well, I'm interested that they use the term black art, because that attribute was given to the field by a single individual who dominated the field for about 20 or 30 years. His name was Alexis Carrel. He believed that the contamination of tissue cultures with airborne bacteria could be eliminated or prevented by maintaining sterile circumstances. That, in his mind included everything being painted black. Now, don't ask me that rationale for that, because I can't explain it.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's so Gothic. I love it.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Exactly. All of his technicians and he himself were dressed from head to foot in black. And he had a gallery around the lab where reporters could wander. To see these mystical black figures roaming the laboratory floor, doing strange things with strange implements and ending up with cells growing.

[Jad Abumrad]

It must have seemed like witchcraft on them.

[Leonard Hayflick]

It didn't seem like they believed it was witchcraft. Especially because Alexis Carell claimed to have kept a chick heart alive for 46 years.

[Jad Abumrad]

A chick heart? Yes, like the heart of a baby chicken.

[Leonard Hayflick]

It was a fragment of tissue from the chick heart.

[Jad Abumrad]

So for 46 years, the cells divided and divided every couple of days.

[Leonard Hayflick]

That's what was alleged.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, 46 years is a long time.

[Robert Krulwich]

Right, I'll say.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so scientists thought that if they've gone this long, they'll probably go forever.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Forever.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because of Corel and a couple other scientists, it was thought that cells are immortal.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Under the proper conditions, they'll grow indefinitely.

[Jad Abumrad]

And Correl's little chicken heart seemed to be proof of this. It just kept spewing new cells, which he kept keep dividing into new bottles.

[Leonard Hayflick]

As the New York Post said, quote, if all of the cells produced by Dr. Carrel from his cultured chicken heart were kept together, they would produce a rooster that could cross the Atlantic Ocean in a single stride. End quote.

[Jad Abumrad]

I wish I'd come up with that myself. Now, was that a quote that was made lovingly or admiringly, or was that a sort of sneer?

[Leonard Hayflick]

It was made to sell the New York Post.

[Jad Abumrad]

But people bought it, I guess, is what I'm asking.

[Leonard Hayflick]

You're darn right they bought it until it was torpedoed by me.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right. Well, that's the story that I want to get to next. It happened by accident. He did not set out to torpedo the rooster or the whole idea of cellular immortality. It just kind of happened. He was in the lab, it was the 50s, he was just a kid, and he becomes worried, this was an ordinary worry at the time, that his little cells would become contaminated.

[Leonard Hayflick]

I knew at the time that if you cultured normal human tissue from adults, you might grow simultaneously unwanted viruses, because.

[Jad Abumrad]

In adults, the viruses would sometimes sneak into the cells and hide there.

[Leonard Hayflick]

And I didn't want, of course, my culture to be contaminated with these viruses. So I zeroed in on human fetal tissue.

[Jad Abumrad]

Human fetal tissue? As in from abortions? Sorry to ask an ignorant question, but abortion at that time was. Was it anything like the crazy political thorn Bush that it is now?

[Leonard Hayflick]

No, far more rational.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was actually quite easy. He says he just picked up the.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Phone, called my friends at the University of Pennsylvania and said I wanted fetuses whenever they were surgically aborted. And as you might expect, when you put your order in for fetal tissue, you know, not when the phone will ring.

[Jad Abumrad]

He never knew when the shipments would arrive.

[Leonard Hayflick]

I would receive maybe one fetus one week, and then two weeks later, another one.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so to keep track of things, and this turns out to be key, he kept a log. Every time he'd get a new shipment, he would jot down the arrival day and then drop the cells into the flask, watch them divide, do the whole deal, and then every couple weeks he would come and check on them. And that's when it started.

[Leonard Hayflick]

I began to realize that some of the cultures are unhappy. They stop dividing.

[Jad Abumrad]

At first it was just one. One batch. What were you thinking? At this point?

[Leonard Hayflick]

I didn't know what to think because.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was just an observation. And it was just one batch. Batch A, let's call it. Yeah, alright, no biggie. We'll see how it goes.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Come back. And a month later I find out that not only A is still not doing its thing, but B and C aren't either.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now three batches of cells had gone kaput.

[Leonard Hayflick]

I said to myself, well, that's peculiar.

[Jad Abumrad]

Peculiar because here he'd done the same with these cells as he'd done with all the others. Put them in the same glasses, same solution, same conditions. Didn't add up.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Now I have to find out what the cause is. So go back and look at my records.

[Jad Abumrad]

And that is when it smacks him in the face.

[Leonard Hayflick]

What?

[Jad Abumrad]

The thing that all three batches of cells had in common, and he knew this because he'd kept the logs, is that they were the oldest, so to speak. He'd received each batch of fetal tissue from the hospital.

[Leonard Hayflick]

He received it from the hospital roughly nine months ago.

[Jad Abumrad]

At nine months or thereabouts, they just kind of hit a wall and they stopped dividing.

[Leonard Hayflick]

But the ones received one month, two months, three months, four months, five months.

[Jad Abumrad]

Six months ago, those cells were doing just fine.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Perfect. Beautiful.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he kept seeing this. Simultaneously, two thoughts enter his mind. Thought number one, this can't be an accident.

[Leonard Hayflick]

If it was an accident, it should be random.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thought number two, wait a second. This has to be an accident.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Because I had been taught by experts.

[Jad Abumrad]

That cells are immortal.

[Leonard Hayflick]

They will grow forever.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right, fast forward a few months. Those two conflicting thoughts are still fighting it out in Hayflick's mind. Along comes the annual biology conference, the.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Biggest scientific meeting in the world at that time. The meeting was held in Atlantic City.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hayflick and a few friends decide to hop in a car and crash the meeting, because the featured speaker was a guy Hayflick really admired, a guy by the name of Ted Puck.

[Leonard Hayflick]

I want to hear what he has to say, and I'm going to. If you. If I can get enough guts, I'm going to ask him a question. I remember it distinctly. It was a big whore, like a thousand people. I'm sure it's an exaggeration, but it's huge or lots of people. And I'm somewhere in the middle, listening to his talk.

[Isaiah Zagar]

You see the methods previously developed whereby single cells.

[Leonard Hayflick]

And at the end, as is customary, you ask for questions.

[Robert Krulwich]

Are there any questions?

[Leonard Hayflick]

I timidly raise my hand.

[Hiroo Ogawa]

So, yes, the young fellow in the center.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, you.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes.

[Leonard Hayflick]

And I ask him the following question. Dr. Puck, have you ever found that.

[Jad Abumrad]

The cells that you culture stop dividing? Did you want to give him a kind of a gotcha or what were you thinking?

[Leonard Hayflick]

I was ready to publish. I wanted to know whether I'm in trouble, whether I have an artifact on my hands that nobody has seen, because they do it. Right.

[Jad Abumrad]

I see.

[Leonard Hayflick]

I'm still worried.

[Jad Abumrad]

Got it.

[Leonard Hayflick]

And so he says. He looks at me, you know, like I'm an idiot.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, of course the cells stop dividing occasionally. Of course, I lose my cells occasionally, but I simply go back to the freezer and reconstitute them. Meaning that when the cells stop dividing, which he just admitted they do all the time, he just said, eh, something happened. I don't know what. I'll just go back to the freezer and get more.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, that's not right, because if they stopped dividing, they might have just died.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's not that he was cheating. It's that he thought he had screwed up.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Oh, then I knew it was a gotcha.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, he didn't yell gotcha right at that moment. He just sat back down. But now he knew it was real, because even the brilliant Ted Puck had seen it, too. But like everyone else for the past 60 years, he just hadn't recognized it for what it was. I imagine in labs all over the country, there must have been a lot of moments when cells stopped dividing. And at every one of Those moments, you're saying the thought that popped into the technician's mind is I f Ed up?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Absolutely.

[Jad Abumrad]

That seems like a crazy kind of mass delusion.

[Leonard Hayflick]

It's called dogma. Do you know the definition of the word dogma? Yeah, I've heard that word before. That's it. The concept of mortality was absent from people's minds.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, wait. If they didn't understand the idea of mortality, then how did scientists explain getting older and moving towards death?

[Jad Abumrad]

Pre torpedoing?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Radiation. What radiation? What do you mean? No, seriously. I mean, it was this idea that, like, stuff is happening outside the cell, that radiation is bombarding the cell, like gamma rays and alpha rays and these kinds of things, and then that somehow ages the cell.

[Robert Krulwich]

So the trigger is outside the being, not inside the cell.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right.

[Leonard Hayflick]

So my discovery, and I pointed it out in that first paper was to indicate that it's in the cell, not outside the cell. That's where the action is.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hayflick argued that somewhere in the cell There's a counter. 1, 2, 3. There's gotta be four. Something in the cell is keeping track. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Because after about nine months of happy dividing in a petri dish, when the cell gets to 50 divisions, sometimes it's a few ticks more, a few ticks less. But 50 is the average. And when it reaches 50, little counter inside the cell, stop. 50 is the magic number. Where did this number 50 come from?

[Leonard Hayflick]

You'll have to ask God that question.

[Jad Abumrad]

Nonetheless, Hayflick, not God, has his name forever attached to that number because it's become known as the Hayflick lim. Now, one of the interesting things Hayflick told me while we looked at his secret stash of fetal cells in his garage is that there is a way to tinker with the cellular counter. If you lower the temperature by, say, putting the cells in liquid nitrogen, as he has, the dividing will get slower and slower and slower until it stops at 250 degrees below zero. The cells will. Will not divide and they won't die. They'll just wait for as long as you keep them frozen.

[Leonard Hayflick]

The cells I have in my freezer have been frozen for 44 years.

[Jad Abumrad]

Does that make them the longest.

[Leonard Hayflick]

These cells are the longest frozen normal human cells in the world.

[Jad Abumrad]

The fetal cells he's talking about, incidentally, are. Are the ones that he used to discover the Hayflick limit. He calls it WI38. What do we know about the mother of the fetus that created wi38?

[Leonard Hayflick]

She was a Swedish woman, and she wanted an abortion because she had many children and was very poor. Her husband was not a good father, and that's where this tissue came from.

[Jad Abumrad]

Here's the kicker. After the Hayflick limit experiments, these cells, this particular strain, was used to incubate and produce vaccines, all different kinds.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Polio, German measles, measles, mumps, rabies.

[Jad Abumrad]

And anybody born in the last 50 years who's had any of these vaccines has had these cells in their body.

[Leonard Hayflick]

The numbers of people who have benefited from these vaccines now exceed 1 billion people.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's billion with a B.

[Leonard Hayflick]

That's billion with a B. Wow.

[Jad Abumrad]

One aborted child creates a fleet of cells that vaccinate a billion people. Think about that for a second. And is it true that you have a cell line from. Is it your daughter?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Yes. I also have cells in there from the omnion of my daughter Susan.

[Jad Abumrad]

Do you keep them for purely scientific reasons, or is it sort of like stamp collecting?

[Leonard Hayflick]

You have them as well? It would be. He's a scientist now herself, and so I'll probably give the ampules to her so she can do with them what she wishes.

[Jad Abumrad]

But you keep them because it's your daughter.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Mostly, yes. Mostly. Yeah, sure.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's really sweet. Here's the interesting thing, scientifically. If you were to warm these cells up, give them some food, they'd start to divide again.

[Robert Krulwich]

5.

[Jad Abumrad]

And not only that, they pick up right where they left off. And even if you froze them again, let's say the 16th doubling, and kept them that way for a thousand million years wouldn't matter, because as soon as you unfroze them off, they'd go 17, 18, 19, 20, on their way to 50 without missing a beat.

[Leonard Hayflick]

What does that tell you? Tells you that cells remember. They have a memory.

[Jad Abumrad]

Somehow the cell always remembers where it is in the count to 50.

[Robert Krulwich]

Cells can't count. How do they do that?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, that was the next big question.

[Leonard Hayflick]

So we set about to do a number of experiments.

[Jad Abumrad]

However, the next big breakthrough came in 1971, and not by Hayflick. While he was doing his experiments in Philly, halfway across the world, the very.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Same moment, a Russian named Alexia Lovenikov.

[Jad Abumrad]

Was attending a lecture. Lecture about Hayflick's research. And he left that lecture puzzled by this question that you asked. How do the cells remember?

[Leonard Hayflick]

And when he. Have you ever been to Moscow? Well, anyhow, so he entered Moscow subway station, went down to the railroad platform, and suddenly he had an insight. He had a brilliant insight. When he looked at the railroad track.

[Jad Abumrad]

The first thing he thought Was those tracks. Tracks look a lot like DNA.

[Leonard Hayflick]

If you take your aortax and you twist it, you got DNA.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, say it's some DNA, and that DNA's job is to count to 50 and then yell stop. Well, we know part of the DNA has the job of yelling, but the other stuff, the rest of it.

[Leonard Hayflick]

What if it's just a long sequence of nonsense?

[Jad Abumrad]

Nonsense? What if every time that cellular copier comes along to copy the cell, you lose one little piece of it, the nonsense? Well, if you had, say, 50 pieces of nonsense as a buffer around the sense part, the switch, well, then it would take 50 copies to snip away all the nonsense until you're left with the switch, which would turn on and tell the cell to stop dividing. Back in Philadelphia, as we were wrapping up that first interview, a question occurred to me. If we kind of understand how that off switch works, shouldn't we theoretically be able to figure out how to tinker with when the switch gets switched?

[Leonard Hayflick]

In theory, I suppose you could. Yeah, sure.

[Jad Abumrad]

And wouldn't that allow us to have a longer amount of cell divisions?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Well, that certainly doesn't violate any knowledge about this system, of course.

[Jad Abumrad]

And wouldn't that theoretically give us something, whether it be extra extended life or something?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Yes, certainly.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hayflick had clearly been asked this question a million times, and he patiently explained to me that there is a way right now that we can tinker with the timing of the switch. You take an enzyme called telomerase.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Telomerase.

[Jad Abumrad]

Throw it into the mix, and every time that cell gets copied and loses pieces of track, the telomerase enzyme comes.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Along and adds them back on and maintains the. The length constant.

[Jad Abumrad]

That way, the track is always long, the stop switch never gets switched, and the cell can keep going and going and going.

[Leonard Hayflick]

That's how they become immortal. So you're not going to tell me? Well, let's inoculate everybody with telomerase.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. And?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Well, if you volunteer, we'll have a shot at it. Are you ready?

[Jad Abumrad]

There. There must be. If I were to go out and shout from your balcony right here, I'm sure I'd get 100 people who'd want to try.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Really? Not after I tell you what you still don't know.

[Jad Abumrad]

What's that?

[Leonard Hayflick]

95% of all tumors contain telomerase, which normal cells do not contain. The single most distinguishing criteria between normal and cancer cells known today is that fact.

[Jad Abumrad]

So the trade off for cellular immortality, at least in this case, is cancer. But here's the weird thing. If you look around you will see that our Hayflick limit of 50 is not the only one.

[Leonard Hayflick]

We do know that if you look at the normal cells of a Galapagos tortoise, which has been reported in the literature, they undergo about 125 doublings, if I remember correctly.

[Jad Abumrad]

So their Hayflick number is 125 and ours is 50?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Apparently, yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Does that correlate to the the Galapagos turtle living twice as long?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Well, it seems to. But that comparison may be anecdotal and not universal.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's what Hayflick is up to these days. He's become fascinated by animals who age differently than us, who might have a doubling limit of, you know, 200, 500 or no limit at all.

[Leonard Hayflick]

There are a whole class of animals that don't age.

[Jad Abumrad]

We'll get like what?

[Leonard Hayflick]

The American lobster.

[Jad Abumrad]

Lobster doesn't age.

[Leonard Hayflick]

It either does not age or the rate is so slow we can't measure it.

[Jad Abumrad]

I don't even know how to imagine that. What does that mean?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Well, what it means is that the animal gets bigger and bigger.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just grows.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Yes, there are lobsters that have been found recently. I read about one that's over £50.

[Robert Krulwich]

I looked it up. The largest lobster ever reported was close to. Yes, 50 pounds, found in the 1950s, just off the coast of New Jersey.

[Jad Abumrad]

New Jersey?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yep.

[Jad Abumrad]

How old is a 50 pound lobster? Who knows?

[Leonard Hayflick]

No indication.

[Robert Krulwich]

It was wearing a Grover Cleveland for president button. So very old.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab.

[Robert Krulwich]

We'll be right back.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

My name is Ayushi Srivastava and I'm.

[Jad Abumrad]

Calling from the University of Chicago.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of.

[Host/Reporter]

Science and technology in the modern world.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

More information about [e-mail].

[Jad Abumrad]

Ready?

[Robert Krulwich]

What am I supposed to do? I don't have to do anything, right?

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumran.

[Robert Krulwich]

And I'm Robert Krylwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

And today we're talking about aging.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Yep.

[Jad Abumrad]

Do you ever wonder why it is that human beings live? Like, how long do we live?

[Robert Krulwich]

About 70ish, roughly.

[Jad Abumrad]

Something like that, yeah. So why 70 as opposed to 7 or like 700? Why that number?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, that's, you know, that's a good question. Because every, apparently every creature has for some reason a sort of natural range. So you want to hear a very cool one? How about a rat? Got a rat in your head?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

And a squirrel the rat and the squirrel.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Here you have two animals people call. I have friends who call squirrels, tree rats.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's Cynthia Kenyon from the University of California, San Francisco. I recently paid her a visit.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

You know, so in other words, they're very similar to each other, they're rodents. But a rat has a three year lifespan, whereas a squirrel has a 25 year lifespan. And no one knows why, really. There are theories, but no one really knows why. I got the idea that maybe somehow lifespan was evolvable in the sense that there might be genes in the animal which, when changed, allow big leaps in lifespan to take place.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you figured you could just hunt the genes down.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Exactly.

[Robert Krulwich]

And this is exactly what she seems to have done. But not with rats and squirrels.

[Jad Abumrad]

With what?

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Why don't I show you the incubator where we keep all the worms.

[Robert Krulwich]

With worms?

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Little round worms? Yes, called C. Elegans. You can't see them with the naked eye, they're just a little speck. But when you put them under a microscope, you see how beautiful they are. So first I'm showing you here the normal worm when it's a young adult. And what you can see is it's very active and it's healthy looking.

[Robert Krulwich]

So we're looking at this dish, and in the dish is this worm.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

It's a wiggler, moves really nicely. Okay, now let's fast forward two weeks.

[Robert Krulwich]

Then she showed us a different set of worms in a different dish. These worms were 13 days old, day 13 of adulthood. They only live to 14.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Just lived two weeks.

[Robert Krulwich]

They're at the very, very end of their lives.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

And what we see here is a dead one. So one has already died, and another one that's clearly in the nursing home just lying still, not moving at all. And you can tell immediately that it's. It looks kind of wrinkled and lethargic. And even if you've never seen a worm ever, you can tell that one is old.

[Robert Krulwich]

So there you got it, you got a young worm, you have an old worm. Essentially what Cynthia Kenyon is trying to do is she's trying to hunt down the gene that could turn that old worm backwards in time and make it look like a young worm.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

The worms have about 20,000 genes. So the idea is really simple. You just go and change genes at random, one by one, one at a time, and see whether any of these gene changes can extend lifespan.

[Robert Krulwich]

How long did it take for you to bump into a good one?

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Well, we actually were really lucky to find a gene pretty quickly. And we found that if we change this one gene called Daf2, if we change this one gene called Daf2, then the worms live twice as long as.

[Robert Krulwich]

They normally would, just like that. And pretty much by sheer luck, she'd taken this worm and stretched its lifespan from 14 days all the way out to about 28 days.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just 28? Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

It doesn't sound like a lot to you, but to a worm, that's double oya. Can you tell me, like, when you ran into it, did you do a little war dance around the lab? Were you?

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Yeah, it was amazing. I mean, it was incredible. I had a person in my Lab who said DAF2 is magic. And she's right. Okay, I'm going to show you these magic worms which are exactly the same as the normal worms, except that we've changed one gene, the DAF2 gene.

[Robert Krulwich]

So remember that old wrinkly worm that we saw before?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

The worm she's about to show me is the same age. It's a 13 day old, really old worm.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Okay. And it's bolting out of its. Bolting into the picture here, it looks young, it's moving, it's very healthy, it's active. And actually, if you take a microscope, then you look at the tissues, what you see is the tissues of the worm look young. If you just look at that, you just sit there and you just look at it and look at it and look at it and just let it sink in. What it means, it's really amazing. It's really very deep and fundamental. You're looking at something that I guess wasn't supposed to happen in some funny way. They were supposed to die.

[Jad Abumrad]

Shul, what exactly is this gene doing to make them live longer?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, maybe we should ask the question a different way, because the worms that lived longer than they didn't actually have this working gene.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

When we make a mutation in the DAF2 gene, we damage it. It actually causes it not to work as well. So that actually is kind of profound. That tells you right away that the worm has a gene in it that's shortening the worm's lifespan, which is why.

[Robert Krulwich]

She calls it the Grim Reaper gene.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

The Grim Reaper gene.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's the gene that makes you die.

[Jad Abumrad]

If you're a worm.

[Robert Krulwich]

Right. So by damaging this gene, Cynthia and her team essentially are taking the Grim Reaper and knocking his knees out.

[Jad Abumrad]

Stop that.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Okay, so the question is, what exactly is the DAF2 doing to make the cell age more quickly?

[Robert Krulwich]

Here is where the story gets a little weird.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Well, we found another gene Whose name is also daf, but it's a different daf. It's called daf6.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's a king.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

And this is a gene whose normal function is to keep you young. It's like a fountain of youth gene.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. So wait, there was a Grim reaper gene before, right? And now there's a fountain of youth gene.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's what she discovered. And inside the worms, these genes are struggling with each other. Here's how it works. When a worm ages, normally, the DAF2.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Receptor, DAF2 kind of squashes the activity of DAFs in it turns it down.

[Host/Reporter]

Silence.

[Robert Krulwich]

And so the worm ages.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Okay. So when you come along and you inhibit the activity of the DAF2 receptor.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ouch.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Now you liberate DAF16. It's free. It springs into action and it activates about 100 genes in the DNA. These hundred genes each do a little tiny good thing for the cell. And altogether it makes the cell live twice as long.

[Robert Krulwich]

So let me just back up here. So there's the bad gene, the gene that says, all right, everybody die. But the way that it tells everybody die is it goes particularly over to this little guy over in the corner who's the good guy, who's repairing and protecting and fighting disease. And it says, it conks it on the head like some kind of Three Stooges thing. It says, you shut up.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Exactly.

[Robert Krulwich]

So if that good guy actually aim a girl can stay vibrant, then we are in the ball game for a little while longer.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Exactly. Very good. And you can get a lifespan that may increase, say 100% like the one I mentioned, even longer, even threefold.

[Jad Abumrad]

Threefold?

[Robert Krulwich]

How'd you do that?

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Well, we found that signals from the reproductive system affect aging.

[Robert Krulwich]

It turns out Kenyon and her team found that if you steal away some of the worm's baby making powers, that alone makes them live longer. If you do that, so what we did. And if you crippled the Grim Reaper gene, and if you strengthen the fountain.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Of youth gene, the best possible change we knew how to make.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, now we're talking.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

We get incredibly healthy animals that live to be six times as long as on average, which would be like 500 years for a human. And they're so healthy, it's incredible.500.

[Robert Krulwich]

So that would be like Ben Franklin still being around playing golf.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Yeah, it just blows your mind to think about it. Which, by the way, that doesn't mean that it will ever be possible in humans.

[Robert Krulwich]

Why do we turn. Why are we listening to this program? No, she kind of has to say that because she's a scientist, she doesn't know yet whether it affects us. On the other hand, she has started a company, yes, Elixir, and the company is making a pill, and it's a pill for people. Interestingly, have you any notion of how much you could slow down the process?

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Well, we don't know, you know, we're just hoping that we can slow it down at all.

[Robert Krulwich]

But just imagine, used to be people.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Would talk about that, but it's the world of fairy tales and fantasy and now it sort of reopens the quest for the fountain of youth in a new molecular way.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait a second, though. What happens if she, dare I say it succeeds with this little pill of hers? Do we necessarily want a lot of 500-year-old golfers hanging around, not getting out of the way?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, we're already there in some places in the world. In Germany and in Japan, the population of older people has grown to the point where you, if you were a middle aged or younger person, you'd feel the oppression of having so many people to support.

[Jad Abumrad]

Can we talk about Japan for a second? Japan might be a canary in the coal mine, as it were. Sort of a glimpse of where we're all headed. Jocelyn Ford, a reporter, has been looking at aging societies in Asia and recently took a trip back to Japan, where she used to live, to see how they're dealing with things.

[Host/Reporter]

When I arrived in Japan, it was immediately obvious that there was something different here. I went into the closest little town to the airport and there was a festival, a street festival going on. I thought, great. Went down the street. And what really surprised me is I think of street fairs and kids playing and, you know, let's go out with the family. But everyone sitting around listening to the music was there were a lot of gray heads. I met a guy who was like 90 years old and he was on a bicycle. Hi. And when he cycled off, I felt it's a different society.

[Hiroo Ogawa]

Bottom line is this. In Japan, aging is very fast, the fastest ever in the entire world.

[Host/Reporter]

This guy banging the chalkboard, that's Hiroo Ogawa Hirogawa.

[Hiroo Ogawa]

I'm a demographer at the Nihon University Population Research Institute.

[Jad Abumrad]

Where is that, by the way?

[Host/Reporter]

Nihonu.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is that in Tokyo?

[Host/Reporter]

In Tokyo. And he said that the reason that Japan looks so old all of a sudden is because in part people are living longer. But that's not the big reason. The big reason is that the birth rate is falling.

[Hiroo Ogawa]

Look, I mean, Japanese population is shrinking.

[Jad Abumrad]

They're not having as many kids already.

[Host/Reporter]

That's exactly it. And this is something that's happening all over the developed world. People are having smaller families and as a result, there are fewer young people, more older people.

[Hiroo Ogawa]

Right now, in fact, the proportion of the elderly, I mean 65 and over, is more than 21%, which is the highest in the entire world.

[Host/Reporter]

21% elderly. Can you imagine what that looks like?

[Jad Abumrad]

No.

[Host/Reporter]

Just think Florida. What do you think of when you think of Florida?

[Jad Abumrad]

Florida. I think of beaches and I. Well, that's where a lot of old folks go to retire. So I think it's of a lot of, you know, 70 and 80 year olds.

[Host/Reporter]

Florida is the oldest state in the United States, but compared to Japan, it's young. It's only 17% over 65 and Japan is 21%.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Whoa.

[Host/Reporter]

So imagine that all of Japan looks like Florida, just older. And Ogawa expects that percentage to double in 40 years.

[Hiroo Ogawa]

Right now, I mean, we cannot really picture the future scenario, but it's going to change.

[Host/Reporter]

Well, I got some insight into that change back at the street fair. I went to get some tea and rice crackers in that shop. There was a 103-year-old granny. I tried to talk to her, but she couldn't really communicate. She didn't really know what was going on. Her daughter, who's in her 60s, is the main caretaker.

[Jad Abumrad]

In her 60s, wow.

[Host/Reporter]

In her 60s and she has to. Granny can no longer get out of her wheelchair by herself. She can't take a bath. She's completely dependent on her daughter like a baby. But she's a lot heavier than a baby. And her daughter had really strained her back and hurt herself. The elder looking after the aged, basically. And that's probably the biggest problem.

[Hiroo Ogawa]

The problem is that the caregivers prime age of the caregivers is about 40s and 50s, so we are sort of short on caregivers.

[Jad Abumrad]

That never occurred to me that from society's perspective, the reason kids are, are good, are useful, is so that they take care of the old people.

[Host/Reporter]

Yeah. A government spokesman I spoke with, thank you so much for making this, Mr. Taniguchi. He was quite concerned about that.

[Jad Abumrad]

There's going to be a shortage of labor as society ages and someone has got to fill the void.

[Host/Reporter]

In countries like the United States, we might import foreign labor, bring in immigrants, care for the elderly, you know.

[Jad Abumrad]

But in Japan, it'll happen only reluctantly. It's not so simple because this society is still debating whether it's going to be a good thing or not to increase the Number of immigrants. We have decided to open our labor market to some extent.

[Host/Reporter]

Nishimura Yasutoshi, he's another government spokesman.

[Jad Abumrad]

First we'll start.

[Host/Reporter]

He said the government has decided they.

[Jad Abumrad]

Can allow maybe more than 100, 100.

[Host/Reporter]

Filipino caregivers to come into the country.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just a hundred.

[Host/Reporter]

Just a hundred. I know what you're thinking. Is it basically. Is it basically because Japan is xenophobic?

[Hiroo Ogawa]

Well, let's put it this way. Japanese people tend to have this island concept. Having more international workers in our neighborhood might dilute that kind of. I think that's what the Japanese people might be worried about.

[Host/Reporter]

What's wrong with that? Things change.

[Hiroo Ogawa]

I think basically communication, particularly when you're sick. I mean, when you're bedridden, if the nurses are foreigners, you have to communicate, and it's very difficult.

[Host/Reporter]

You know, some people might think that's xenophobic, that people don't. Don't want to deal with foreigners. But that's not really what it's about. People don't want to be a burden to anybody. They don't want to depend on anybody.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

I don't want to have same burden.

[Host/Reporter]

If you say, this is Mr. Suga, he's a demographic researcher. You just don't want to be a burden.

[Robert Krulwich]

No.

[Host/Reporter]

This feeling that you shouldn't be a burden, it runs very deep. Physically, psychologically, both of them.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

I just prefer I will be helped not by any other people.

[Host/Reporter]

Why is that?

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Just feeling it might cause problem with them, with other people.

[Host/Reporter]

So you'd be more comfortable knowing that you're not putting anyone else causing them trouble.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Yep, yep, yep. So if I would need some help from other people, I might want to kill my. Myself.

[Host/Reporter]

That's how extreme it gets. This is a young man who's 30. He said, I would rather commit suicide than be taken care of by somebody who doesn't want to take care of me. Who. Who I'd be a burden on.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

You know, there is a culture like two, 300 years ago in Japan. If the old woman's alive until like 6, 70 years old, then family take these old mothers to a mountain and stay there. Make the mothers stay there.

[Host/Reporter]

There is a very long tradition in Japan of. They call it obasute. Oba suite, oba stay. Oba means grandma and means to throw, throw away.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're serious?

[Host/Reporter]

They have whole movies about this in Japan. There's one called the Ballad of Narayama. It's set in a very poor rural village about a hundred years ago. Tells the story of a son taking his Old mother up the mountain. On their way up, they pass by another son literally throwing his father off of a cliff.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

It makes a family happier.

[Host/Reporter]

So grandma stays in the mountain and starves to death.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep, yep.

[Host/Reporter]

The family is happier because there's less of a burden.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Right?

[Host/Reporter]

It was understood among all the generations, this is the way the problem was solved.

[Jad Abumrad]

Not anymore, obviously.

[Host/Reporter]

Right, right. Japan is really quite socialist these days. They look after everyone in society. But that idea is still out there. So what do you do today? You don't want your kids to take care of you. You don't want foreigners to take care of you. Who's left? Well, one solution is instead of having people do these jobs, have machines.

[Jad Abumrad]

Machines? Robots. Robots? Are you joking? It's not actually a joke. Panasonic and others are manufacturing robots as caregivers.

[Host/Reporter]

When you think about it, it sort of makes sense. Why don't we automate the heavy duty work?

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Welcome to meet Icon.

[Host/Reporter]

I visited a bunch of labs and met with some scientists.

[Jad Abumrad]

This robot is connected to here.

[Host/Reporter]

Can I ask what that is? They've got robots that will. It looks like a dentist chair. Tell your wheelchair where to go. This is going. There's a special pair of trousers that you can put on. And if your legs are weak and you can't walk well, it will help you walk. There's a washing machine robot. It looks like it's got a fancy handle. It's actually for washing people. Are any of these in actual use?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes, they are.

[Host/Reporter]

People do not want to have to ask somebody to clean their diapers, to wash their bum.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right?

[Host/Reporter]

I think for anybody in any society.

[Jad Abumrad]

Absolutely.

[Host/Reporter]

That is a difficult thing to have to ask somebody.

[Hiroo Ogawa]

Robots are more. I mean, you don't have to talk, you just press a button.

[Host/Reporter]

Now this is where I start to get weirded out. I went to a nursing home about an hour and a half outside of Tokyo. Big room with lots of people mostly sitting around. There's a television. About three people are watching the tv. One's looking out the window. I walked in and there were a lot of old people just sitting around, each keeping mostly to themselves, sitting very quietly, not talking. It was sort of sad. In steps, Paro the seal. Paro is one of the world's first therapy robots. Get it?

[Jad Abumrad]

No. What does that mean?

[Host/Reporter]

What they've done is they've made this sort of like a large stuffed animal. White, furry, long eyelashes. And it flutters them at you and it squeals. When Paro came out, one of the grannies just lit up, got so Excited, she peered into the seal's eyes and she tried to talk to it.

[Jad Abumrad]

She said, I'm happy to come to Paro.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

It's the same feeling when her family come here.

[Host/Reporter]

I was taken aback. I mean, it's not much more than a moving stuffed animal. How could you look at it and see company, see something alive, see something comforting? I feel a little bit warm. Is Pero warm?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes. Palo has the kind of temperature control.

[Host/Reporter]

I spoke to the developer, Mr. Shibata. So you're warm blooded, huh? He said, yeah. They wanted a creature that would give them positive feedback, but also sort of needed them.

[Robert Krulwich]

Being stroked is good for Palo. So Parlo tried to be stroked by.

[Host/Reporter]

The owner, like you're doing right now.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Host/Reporter]

Did you program to want to be held?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Host/Reporter]

He also programmed them to respond to different names.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah. So for example, I call him as Palo. If give a new name, like John.

[Host/Reporter]

Or something, or like Choco Chan Suga.

[Robert Krulwich]

Jam and call the new name again and again. Paro gradually learns a new name and start to respond.

[Jad Abumrad]

So it's learning.

[Host/Reporter]

Put you down carefully because we don't want to hurt you. Oh, you want to be held again. They learn from their environment. Now these are really rudimentary, you know, beginning baby robots. But it worked, Jad, it worked. They adored it. They were loving it. And it was loving them in their minds.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Aya.

[Jad Abumrad]

Aya.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Aiya.

[Host/Reporter]

I started to think maybe this is a solution. People might actually be able to engineer compassion, engineer companionship. But then I started asking. A lot of people around me, took an informal straw poll. Would you feel comfortable with a robot taking care of you? And most people said, no, not really. Like this woman, Keiko Sugi. She actually came up with a brilliant idea which seems like a no brainer. She has a nursing home which is together with a preschool.

[Leonard Hayflick]

So we'd like you to take a tour.

[Host/Reporter]

You walk into the room and you are bombarded by these little bodies, screaming and flying around. The vitality is just over the top and it's infectious. And if you're an old person in that environment, you have no time whatsoever to dwell on the idea that you are dying. The kids demand your attention. They need you. They're needed again.

[Jad Abumrad]

But. But the first thing that you told us at the very beginning was that there are more old folks, less kids. Well, what happens when these kids we're listening to right now, when they dwindle, there's just a bunch of old people around and there may be one kid left and they all go to visit that One kid. I mean, that, that, that can't work.

[Host/Reporter]

You expect me to have an answer? Maybe we should import kids. I don't know.

[Jad Abumrad]

No, I mean, you're joking, obviously, but I guess what I'm asking is like, are we left at the end to think that a society cannot support all of its members getting old? That somehow the old have to step out of the way?

[Host/Reporter]

Dad, I think your thinking is basically old fashioned. There will be more old people and fewer young people. That's a fact. You're not going to turn the clock back on this? Societies do change. People do come up with new ideas. And right now, hey, they're stabbing the dark after them. But one day they'll come up with a solution. So learn to deal with it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Damn. You just bitch slapped me.

[Host/Reporter]

Well, what do you expect? He pulled me all the way across the Pacific Ocean. Across a whole continent.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ew, we gotta go to break now. Cause I gotta sort of pick up my ego here. Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

This is Casey calling from Fort Myers Beach, Florida. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail].

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

And I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

And in this hour we've been talking about aging mostly, but now we're going to turn our attention to the end of that aging process.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, you're talking about dying.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes, maybe we've avoided that topic because that's generally how people deal with death, which is to avoid it, to deny it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah. This next piece is about actually a different way of dealing with death. I should say before we begin it, that it does contain some graphic descriptions of the normal bodily process of aging. But if you have someone in the room who is squeamish or you don't think should hear these things, it's nothing terrible, it's just.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's actually quite nasty. Yeah, it's nasty.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's nasty. Then maybe this is time to shoo them out of the room.

[Jad Abumrad]

This piece was produced by Lou Olkowski. It's about one family, three generations.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Introduce myself.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Jeremiah, the youngest.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

I'm Jeremiah Zagar. He's a filmmaker, son of Isaiah Zagar.

[Jad Abumrad]

His dad, Isaiah is a muralist and his grandfather.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

I'm the grandson of Asher Zagar.

[Jad Abumrad]

Asher Zagar is a health knight.

[Leonard Hayflick]

16, 17, 18, 1920s.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is a video of him that Jeremiah shot of Asher doing His daily exercise routine. He's in his 90s. He's jumping on a trampoline and counting each jump.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

How old are you now?

[Leonard Hayflick]

Me? I'm 90.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

90? You're a healthy man for 90.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Yes, and I'll be still healthy when I'm 91. 92. The great, great grandfather that I'm named after live to 102.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

So you're gonna live to 102.

[Leonard Hayflick]

I don't know, but maybe.

[Jad Abumrad]

At the age of 93, Asher began to decline quickly.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

How do you deal with a man dying in your house? How do you deal with that? Well, you know, my father starts taking photos of him.

[Isaiah Zagar]

One of my modes of understanding was either drawing or photographing.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

He was always taking pictures of my grandfather, just seeing thousands of slides. Thousands.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's how it went for a while. Isaiah, the dad, would take care of his dad and take some photos while grandson Jeremiah basically looked the other way.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Well, I never really knew my grandfather.

[Jad Abumrad]

But then Isaiah got an idea.

[Isaiah Zagar]

I thought to myself, challenge this young boy to this duel who can take the most objective photographs of a dying man.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

It wasn't like we threw down and like I pulled my camera out of my holster and he pulled his camera out of his holster. You know, it wasn't like that. He was involved in my grandfather's death and I wasn't. And so he said, this is how I get involved. It's my senior year in high school, and I was a busboy in this restaurant down the street, and I loved it. And I would bus tables till 2 or 3 in the morning. And then I would get drunk with the people after work. And then I would come back and I would take care of my grandpa. So I would lift him up and change his sheets because otherwise his bedsore would burn more. And he had this horrible bedsore. You can see it in the photographs. And he would hit me while I lifted him up. And then I would photograph him because I would want to sit with him. Because you want to calm him down. And the way you sit with him, I mean, my father was right. You have the camera. I mean, that's how you cope. Otherwise, you're sitting with him and he's just looking at you.

[Jad Abumrad]

During the contest, dad and son shared duties of taking care of Grandpa. And at night, they'd sit at the kitchen table and compare photos.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

As soon as I took the first pictures, you knew mine were better than my father's because my father's were from far away and they were snapshots. And mine were like Specific, like, I was fascinated with him dying. I wanted to know what it looked like.

[Jad Abumrad]

And this went on for about a month, during which time even Jeremiah's friends.

[Isaiah Zagar]

All of his friends, got involved. At the wee hours of the night, I would wake up and I would see that there, surrounding my father were four or five young people. Sure, they were drinking beer and they were joking around, but they were there. They were there while he was there. What I remember most was you and your friends changing his sheets and lifting them and moving them around.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Yeah, Gabrielle did it with me.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Who else did it with you?

[Jeremiah Zagar]

John Lincoln.

[Isaiah Zagar]

They all became initiated into the most problematic event in our lives. It was an amazing, rare scene to see these teenagers attending to death. Well, this is a book of photographs of my father, your grandfather's, last week of life in this very room. So the contest was a month long. Smart guy. I am, huh?

[Jad Abumrad]

You're good.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

You know how to make a contest.

[Isaiah Zagar]

I kept gone for one month.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Good job.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Isaiah. Can you describe this one for me?

[Isaiah Zagar]

Well, the feet look like they're. They were out in the desert, that they've been baked and cracked, and they're dry. Dry. Dried out.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

I mean, look at them. They look like. I mean, look at the nail. The nail is wild. But I mean, everything. It's like, what, though?

[Isaiah Zagar]

I have these same legs?

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Stop touching the photos.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Well, I can almost feel him, like, feeling them. I'll feel you instead.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

There, that's the bedsore. That's what happens.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Oh, it's awful.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Awful.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Oh, awful, awful, awful, awful. Man who prided himself on his health. Look what happened. How does one describe that?

[Jeremiah Zagar]

It looks like rotting meat.

[Isaiah Zagar]

I mean, they're just open wounds, and you move them around. Move them around. But still, it was impossible.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

It's crazy to look at the colors, too. Pink and then white and then green and then brown where it's red.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Well, the white is the muscle, isn't it?

[Jeremiah Zagar]

I took these photos and. Because in black and white, you never get it, you know, you'd never get how painful this must have been. His anus is all red. I mean, like, really red. And you can see that parts of it have broken, and there's just blood gushing out. And it's dried. I mean, the blood is dried. I think this is the last photo. Ooh, this one's tough. You can see, like, the cognition is gone. The mouth is agape. He's buried in his pillow.

[Isaiah Zagar]

He knew it was over. It was just a matter of time.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Now that's it. That's the closest I got to him dying.

[Isaiah Zagar]

He wanted to live forever. The fix was in. From the beginning.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

The fix was in. I was supposed to win.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Sure.

[Jad Abumrad]

Sure.

[Isaiah Zagar]

How could it be any other way?

[Jad Abumrad]

I don't know.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

I could have taken. I could have given up. You wanted me to win.

[Isaiah Zagar]

It was a subterfuge to get you to be with your grandfather as much as possible.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

I thought it was a fair fight. It wasn't.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Ugh. Can there ever be?

[Jeremiah Zagar]

He knew all along that he couldn't.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Take a good picture.

[Isaiah Zagar]

When a person is dying, it's very important that they're surrounded. They're surrounded by. By the light of life. And you don't go into the place of oblivion alone.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

You want me to be there?

[Isaiah Zagar]

I don't know. At this point, I don't know. I'm not at that place yet. Well, what does that mean? With the camera? I mean, just be with me.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Yeah.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Be with me. Be close to me. Be soft with me.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

I guess that's what it's about, really.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Be soft with me.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks to Lou Olkowski for that story and to Isaiah and Jeremiah Zagar, and. Well, we've come to the end of our hour. I guess we should wrap.

[Leonard Hayflick]

Mm.

[Robert Krulwich]

We should mention the website.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes. Radiolab.org is the address. And also if you want to sign up for our podcast.

[Robert Krulwich]

How do you do that?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, you go to Radiolab.org or to iTunes directly. And if you want to send us an email.

[Robert Krulwich]

Robert, if you want to send us an email, you should really write us to our email address, which you could never remember.

[Jad Abumrad]

Radiolab is our email address. I'm Jad Abumran.

[Robert Krulwich]

And I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

We'll see you later.

[Host/Reporter]

Radio Lab.

[Cynthia Kenyon]

Ed Krigenstein.

[Host/Reporter]

Dad. Abu Mad. Ellen Horn.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Capello.

[Host/Reporter]

Capello.

[Isaiah Zagar]

Hi, this is Isaiah Zagoff. Production support by Sarah Pellegrino, Mark Phillips, Scott Goldberg, Sam Lavendear, Aver Mitra, Ryan Scammell, and Jacob Weinberg. Special thanks to Jocelyn Ford, Sam Dingman, Leonard Lopate, Josh Kane. This is Jeremiah Zagar. I want to thank you for listening. Radiolab is supported by a grant from the Alpha P. Sloan Foundation. Radiolab is produced by WNYC New York.

[Jeremiah Zagar]

Public Radio and distributed by npr, National Public Radio.