Art Bell and Marshall Barnes expose CNN’s sanitized replay of a 1997 Columbus, Ohio town hall where Madeline Albright, William Cohen, and Sandy Berger dodged questions on Iraq war plans, with Secret Service suppressing dissent—one-third of attendees opposed prolonged military action. Klatz predicts genetic therapies could extend lifespans by 50-500% within 30 years, dismissing Dr. Lorraine Day’s cancer claims while endorsing aspirin for longevity. Cloning, he argues, is inevitable, with ethical debates overshadowing potential medical breakthroughs like organ banking or headless embryo growth. Ultimately, anti-aging science demands personal responsibility over genetic fate, forcing humanity to confront long-term societal and spiritual consequences. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning as the case may be across all these great time zones and great geography from the Cahitian and Hawaiian Island chains in the west eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the internet.
This is Coast a.m.
Good morning.
I'm Mark Bell.
Well, as many of you may or may not know, February 26th, there is scheduled to be a solar eclipse that peaks at about 9.26 a.m.
There is also supposed to be a new moon on that night.
My guess would be that that is when we are going to go to war, or within 12 hours on either side of that particular time, Feb 26th.
So with that in mind, and with the fact that there was a town meeting in Columbus, Ohio, earlier in the day with Secretary of State Madeline Albright, Defense Secretary Cohen, and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, which I got C because I was home, of course, and awake during those particular hours.
And by the way, which is being replayed right now or just concluded, I'm not sure on CNN.
I'll take a look.
It was an absolutely remarkable event.
Totally remarkable.
And the trio was there to answer questions about our apparent plans to go to war and about the whole dispute with Iraq.
Now, I've got a couple of comments and then a guest for you on the subject.
One, hi, Art.
Have you been watching the replay of today's town meeting in Ohio on CNN?
This is Daryl down in L.A. Question, why would any president who comes from a background of anti-war activities, himself, put his top members in front of any university town meeting at this time?
Answer, there is no answer.
But it does not take a triple-digit IQ to know that the only campuses that will not get this reaction are the service academies, of course.
And then I got this from the Summit Star, some sort of newspaper, I'm not sure where in Lee Summit, Missouri.
No sugarcoating, in quotes, on town hall meeting while a bootleg copy, get this, of Wag the Dog played on Iraqi television.
Secretary of State Madeline Albright, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, and Security General William Cohen, National Security Director, took questions from a divided audience on the campus of Ohio State University.
With some of the people finding out they would not have the opportunity to speak, they took it upon themselves to be heard.
The White House staff and CNN did not have as much control as they thought they would.
At times, the questioning was tough.
If Saddam was watching, he may have gotten the impression that Clinton does not have the backing of the American people, which may cause him not to budge at the bargaining table.
Thank you, Vince, in Leeds Summit, Missouri.
Right in the middle of this whole thing that was going on in Columbus, I got a call from Marshall Barnes, a member of the press, who was actually at the event itself.
And Marshall said, you can't imagine what's going on.
You're not seeing it.
During the breaks, there are incredible things going on.
People are being dragged out.
And I was actually watching, even though the microphones didn't pick up all that was going on in the crowd by a long shot, it was easy to read between the lines, looking at the very tight jaw of Madeleine Albright, which got tighter and tighter and tighter.
Even Defense Secretary Cohen was obviously really, really missed.
And so I've got somebody who was there today, Marshall Barnes, and in a moment we're going to bring him on and we're going to let him tell you what really happened at Columbus today.
And also, I would like to restrict my East of the Rockies line right now to people in Columbus, Ohio, who were also present at this event.
So if that's you, call me now and everybody else kind of hold off and let people get through.
East of the Rockies, specifically Columbus at 1-800-825-5033.
1-800-825-5033.
Columbus only.
It's all of that in a moment, 11 o'clock tonight.
Dr. Ronald Klatz will be talking about immortality and cloning.
All right, again with Columbus, Ohio, and the town meeting.
I was sitting there during the whole thing watching on CNN, shaking my head, saying, oh, God, this is really getting out of control.
You couldn't hear it all the time.
Sometimes you could hear it very clearly, but I was saying this is getting really, really out of control.
And that's when the phone rang, and there was Marshall Barnes, a journalist, a credentialed journalist, there at the event.
Well, you called me, oh, I don't know, maybe a little past midway through the thing, and you said, man, this thing is really out of control.
What was going on?
unidentified
Well, basically, what was going on at that point is that CNN almost lost complete control of the whole show.
And the reason I called you is because I knew that the rest of America wasn't seeing what was happening, because this took place during a commercial break.
And then when they rebroadcasted the show this evening, I watched it and sure enough, plenty of things that happened weren't being shown on TV because the commercials were being run at that time.
But basically, there was about two points during the show where CNN almost lost complete control over it.
In other words, there were a lot of people shouting and cursing.
unidentified
Let me set it up for you so you'll understand.
See, I was there really to cover the press conference.
And the press conference was just for the media only, and it was to happen before the town meeting.
After the press conference was over, then it was time for the media to go to the town meeting, which was an arena right next door to this, and still would do that at the press conference.
And I almost didn't even go.
I mean, because we just figured it was going to be one of these typical TV show town meeting kind of things.
And basically, the dignitaries are going to just rattle out the same rhetoric we'd already heard a million times before.
And the pre-sell of these things, Marshall, is usually that the questioners are picked out beforehand.
Everybody knows what they're going to be asked and all the rest of it.
That obviously was not the case.
unidentified
Well, actually, to a certain degree, it was the case.
But one of the problems that arose is the fact that a lot of the passes were given out to political science students.
I guess the thinking was that either be people that would ask or be particularly interested in the subject and be fairly astute or whatever.
But they forgot that a lot of political science students are pretty cynical about the U.S. government.
And particularly with this particular subject matter, I mean, it was a total, complete miscalculation, not only in who was there, because there's a lot of people, they're just average people who are too, but even in terms of how they thought it was all going to go down and how little control they felt that they needed to have over the program.
Now, I got a fax earlier that said if Saddam was watching, he may have gotten the impression that Clinton does not have the backing of the American people.
Would you agree with that?
unidentified
Oh, yeah, sure.
He doesn't.
I mean, if this event was any indicator, and there probably is, he really doesn't.
Because let me explain to you something that's happened.
So there's a lot of people who weren't there, like Bill Maher, I'm politically incorrect, but I just saw tonight talking about there was only 12 protesters.
There was like close to 50 people that were actually protesting there.
It wasn't just 12.
There was a full third of the audience that seemed to be sympathizing with the protesters.
Well, you could gather that just from listening to the applause and the booze.
unidentified
Exactly, exactly.
Now, and this is, let me give you an idea of what their audience was really like.
There seemed to be about a third of them that were definitely for the protesters, a third that were kind of ambivalent, and then about another third of the audience that was against the protesters.
However, this is where things get really interesting.
Regardless of how the political spectrum was, like whether the person was a pacifist or like let's go bum the heck out of Iraq, the main thing that everyone seemed to agree upon, and this is where the Clinton administration has a big problem, is that everyone wants to Dom out of there.
But the Clinton administration does not want to Dom out of there.
They just want to try to contain him.
And you might recall, there was a gentleman there that was a World War II veteran.
Who said, we better not do this, and we're going to do it in another half-assed way.
unidentified
Exactly.
And the thing about it is that is exactly what the three dignitaries were telling the audience, that we're not going to take out Saddam Hussein.
We're just going to try to take away his weapons.
Well, everyone, from the pacifists to the people who like, yeah, let's go to war, they were saying, well, that means we're going to just have to go back again.
And so as a result, regardless of how they express themselves, the audience as a whole was against the presentation or the message.
They were not satisfied with it, and that's why the Clinton administration has a major problem.
Particularly early on when they were getting a lot of the shouting, what happened?
There were some people dragged out of there, weren't there?
unidentified
Okay, no, yeah, and this is partially CNN's fault.
The one guy who ended up finally getting a chance to speak at the very end, his name is Rick Price.
And what happened was before, he was up in line to ask a question.
But CNN were screening people.
If they didn't like the question that you were going to ask, they weren't letting you speak.
So they were trying to censor this thing.
This thing was supposed to be a pre-packaged product, the spoon feed to the American public, basically using the audience in Columbus as the people they were trying to feed.
But basically what was happening was because of the way it was handled, it takes like a baby spitting the food right back in your face.
And what happened with the Rick Tit situation is that he wasn't allowed to speak.
He's going, why can't I talk?
And at first he thought he wasn't going to be able to talk.
Then he shut off his mic.
And then a big argument ensued and Bernard Shaw came over and got in his face even and then he ended up getting dragged out by an Ohio Highway Patrol intelligence guy and some of the Secret Service and some of the other people.
And he wasn't arrested though.
He was taken out into the lobby.
And there were at that point were OSU police and some other security kind of people.
They were just watching and making sure things get out of hand because a big argument ensued between Rick Tice and a producer from CNN.
And he said, look, this woman said I can't speak and I was in line to talk at the microphone.
So the guy from CNN basically said, all right, we'll let you get back in there again and you will have a chance to speak.
Well, the whole rest of the program went by and they were going to try to keep him from speaking again until he finally got to say something at the very end.
And by the way, let me add, they got him outside after the event.
I don't know whether you saw that or not.
And they asked him what it was that he wanted to drive home.
And it was that we are that it's a color issue.
that we are attacking people of color.
And if they were our color, we wouldn't be attacking them.
And that was the message he wanted to drive home.
unidentified
Well, that's different from what he said in the lobby, because I actually, myself and other people from major media were asked talking to him.
He said at that point, that the major thing he wanted to get across was that, you know, he's not trying to defend Saddam, but by going over there and bombing these people, we're not hurting him.
We're just hurting the people.
And unless we get rid of Saddam, it's not going to mean anything.
We just keep going back over and over and over again.
And the people who are paying the price are the Iraqi people.
And so you have the definite impression that not by a long shot does this administration have the backing of the American people to go to war?
unidentified
Well, this is how I want to couch this, okay?
It's because of the end result.
In other words, the people that even say we should bomb Iraq, they want it to be over with.
In other words, they don't want to just blow up all this stuff and then have to, like, another year or so later, go back and do it again and do it again because they know that that's what they're going to have to do.
But Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, suppressedly said that's all we're trying to do is contain him.
And Madame Albart said the same thing.
Sandy Berger said the same thing.
And it's like people are sick of this.
That whole audience was sick of it.
There was a guy, in fact, not Sandy Berger, but Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, said that he didn't want to do a ground war thing to get Saddam Sustain out of there because there would cause too many casualties among the armed services.
They got a phone call from Mannheim, Germany, and it was a soldier over there who said, "Look, if that's what it takes to just get rid of this guy, I'll be the first one to die for it." I mean, and that was I'm one of those people.
And that bastard Johnson choreographed that war in anguishing, murderous detail from the White House.
And I am of the view that if you're going to have a war, which is one issue, if you're going to go to war, then by God, go to war, get the job done, and get the hell out and have a real victory.
Don't just try to suppress somebody because you really want to keep him around, because you really need him around to keep some sort of stability in the region, or because you don't want his country to dissolve into a civil war.
So I, too, am one of those people, and it seems to me, Marshal, what we had in Columbus, instead of the usual choreographed BS, was we actually had a rude, albeit rude, but real town meeting.
We are discussing what occurred in Columbus, Ohio earlier today.
It was a remarkable, remarkable event in many senses.
For example, it was real.
It was disruptive.
It was democracy in action.
Or it was a rude interruption of cabinet-level officials, depending on your point of view.
Again, I'm holding my East of the Rockies line open for anybody in Columbus, Ohio who attended this event today who would like to comment.
That number is 1-800-825-5033.
Everybody else, please refrain.
We have a journalist, Marshall Barnes, who was there for the event and is telling us what went on during the breaks.
Well, all right, now back to Marshall Barnes in Columbus, Ohio, where they had this absolutely remarkable town meeting, which, by the way, is being replayed as we speak on CNN.
It is being replayed right now, and it was in every way remarkable.
Marshall, welcome back to the program.
Thank you.
Again, if you can give us some idea of, for example, it was bad enough when they had the cameras and mics rolling, but during the breaks, we of course did not get to see what occurred.
And I would have imagined that the participants themselves or the CNN anchor or somebody or another would have tried to get control of the crowd.
So during those breaks, what was going on?
unidentified
Well, basically, what happened was this.
When the whole thing got started, it kind of got started on a shaky level anyway because before the show went on, they had problems with some of the sound system and stuff like that.
And I was with a bunch of reporters in the Associated Press, New York Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer.
I mean, season people.
We're just all kind of sitting around saying, okay, are they going to get the show on the road here or what?
But we weren't expecting anything unique.
Then once they started to get the show on the road, then the protesting, some of the protesting started, and they were having problems with some of the people.
There was some confusion going on.
And as the thing went along, it started to get a little bit worse.
And then, that's when I was talking to you about the guy that was getting taken out and then they brought him back in.
That was Rick Price.
What happened during that break is literally they almost lost control of the whole show.
In fact, Bernard Chaw came out and he said, look, this show is 90 minutes, and we're not going to, or it's going to stay 90 minutes.
We're not going to, you know, you're not going to shut the show down.
I mean, he actually had, you know, Bernard Charles actually had to come out and say that himself.
He was getting really angry.
Sometimes during later on in the program, when they went back to him, you could kind of see his face.
It was tense.
But I was remarking to a reporter from the African Beacon Joe, I said, oh, my God, they might just lose this whole thing.
I mean, it was at that point that I'd say at the second commercial break that they did, we were wondering whether or not they would be able to continue it.
In other words, how out of control, codative The security was not prepared for an unruly audience at all.
They just thought it was going to be your average typical thing, and all they have to look for is maybe the possibility of somebody trying to do something crazy.
Like the Secret Service tries to protect against that all the time anyway.
Instead, what ended up happening is with the way that people were getting upset with the CNN personnel and things like this, they almost got to a position where instead of maybe one or two people they have to worry about, they almost had a riot on their hands.
I mean, it was like that.
I was watching security people because I'm an investigator too and I do things with law enforcement.
And I always look at the big picture through events like this.
And they started moving, as the show went further, they started moving security people to different parts of the auditorium to try to individually get some of the people that were like, you know, heckling and things like that.
But they were being very careful about how they went about doing it because, I mean, it could have turned into something that they would have totally lost the whole thing.
I was watching Albright and Cohen very closely, and both of them had very tight jaws, and they looked, you know, I don't want to say worried.
I'm not sure if they were angry, if they were She was angry?
unidentified
Absolutely.
No question about it.
Because they were hitting her with really tough questions.
And see, Cohen, the funny thing about it was Cohen had gotten hit with a question from out of nowhere by me at the press conference before the thing happened in the first one.
You loved it because it had to deal with remote viewing and side tech and all that stuff.
And in fact, I'll read the question because my reason for going there was to ask him this question.
The question I asked him was, and this is Verbayman, it says, Mr. Secretary, since Saddam could have since moved his weapons, and in view of your support of military remote viewing at Fort Meade when you were a senator from Maine in 1988, do you plan to have the remote viewing firm Sitech, which located Iraqi weapon depots for the U.N. in 1991, do the same for this operation, and if no, why not?
And he was like, where is this coming from?
I mean, it was really funny.
In fact, I have reporters come up to me afterwards say, wow, that was a really great question because it was something from out of the past that he wasn't even expecting.
Basically what he said was that, to paraphrase it, was that he said that they have capabilities right now to monitor what Saddam Hussein's doing, and those are sufficient at this time.
So basically it was kind of like saying, no, we're not going to use side chat if you're doing remote viewing.
But he didn't come out and say, no, we're not going to do it.
That was basically where he was coming from.
But it was a funny, he had this expression on his face like, oh, my God, who the hell is this guy?
But it was pretty funny, so that's what I came to do.
I knew it was going to be a press conference with just the media.
I was there for that.
And then I almost didn't even get bothered going to the town meeting because we thought it was going to be like, you know, one of those things on Nightline.
I mean, everyone did.
The entire, this is really important, is that the initial, the people that were actually there from the media, whether it was local, regional, or national, were totally blown away.
Everyone was taken by surprise by what was happening.
And I was interested in seeing what spin they were going to put on it.
And they really, the spin that I saw, of course, CNN went back to their anchors after the event, and they were very, very defensive about the whole thing.
unidentified
Oh, yeah, because they were shaken up.
They didn't know what spin to put on it at that moment because they were still in shock.
Yeah, but the CNN producer that had dealt with Rick Pipe and let him go back into the auditorium, after the show was over with, he said, well, it's daytime TV, you know, and that's what happened.
What would you imagine the reaction in Baghdad to be?
What would you imagine the reaction in Baghdad?
unidentified
Well, James, I'm sure, loved it.
I mean, I'm sure he loved it.
But see, the thing that he has to realize is this.
Just because there was a bunch of protests and some people were saying we shouldn't go to war and all that kind of stuff over this thing, he's got to realize this, is that the majority of the people in that auditorium pretty much want him dead.
In other words, the CIA said, look, we're going to do a wet operation where we're going to have some guys go in there in the middle of the night and we're going to rig his vehicle so that when he goes for a drive the next time, the axles go out and he wrecks and gets killed or something.
Everyone said, cool.
The main reason why people, there was a difference in there, it was because of the fact that the pacifists don't want to have all these bombing happen because they're saying all these innocent civilians are going to get killed.
And on the other end of the scale, there are people who feel like we've got to do something to them, but they're unsatisfied because they know they're going to have to do it again and they don't want to.
So everyone, although they have different views of the problem, they all agree what the problem is.
Well, the other problem is, of course, that Saddam Hussein does not understand the democracy.
unidentified
Oh, that's right.
Well, he never will.
He doesn't care.
And the thing is, we're going to have to go back.
Even though Sandy Berger and William Cohen tried to make it sound like by doing this particular attack, we could rest easy, at different times they let it slip that we might have to go back again just to try to destroy his weapons.
Did you get the impression that on the several occasions that the National Security Advisor Sandy Berger got to speak, that Madeleine Albright and William Cohen were, how can I put this, concerned about his delivery?
unidentified
No, I don't think so because, no, I didn't pick that up at all.
If they look like they were concerned about anything, it's just the fact that, for example, even the people that look like conservative and like normal average people, okay, that they hope would have been there, they were asking pointed questions.
I mean, this one girl stood up and goes, well, you know, what's going to stop him from rebuilding the arsenal over again?
I mean, you know, everyone, that's what I was saying.
Regardless of how you're going to hear other media, particularly media that weren't even there, like Bill Maher from Politically Incorrect, spin this thing.
The bottom line is this.
They had no real support for their ultimate program, which was basically just to maintain control over the situation and not take out the song.
If you were to divide it up, what percentage of people were actually being rude versus those who were trying to ask some sort of, albeit tough, but illegitimate question?
unidentified
There was probably, I mean, there was probably about 20 some odd to 30 some odd people that were actually being rude from time to time in terms of protest.
Sometimes it might have gone up as many as 50, but that was about it.
But the rest of it was, you could tell by when someone made a comment about like, you know, why can't we just stop them or this isn't going to fix anything?
So we need to think that we can come up with another answer.
The applause was there.
I mean, like, you know, regardless of whether people were being rude or not, it wasn't selling.
What they were trying to tell the American people there at that meeting, it was getting rejected.
Marshall, I asked you what you thought the reaction in Baghdad would be now.
What do you think the reaction is like and the talk is like and the discussion is like and reaction is like in the White House this morning?
unidentified
Well, I think Clinton's like, well, in fact, I've already heard from this guy named Wolf Sumpton from Can N, because he's actually in Washington, D.C. Would that be Wolf Blitzer?
Yeah, that's it.
Wolf Blitzer.
He said that the word there is that obviously it backfired and they're trying to figure out how to fix it.
And I imagine that what might happen, since they're going to do other, I guess they're going to do other town meetings, there's going to be a lot of effort in advance to try to be nicer and try to show Columbus up and make us look like, you know, make the Columbus situation look like it was just a bunch of rowdy people and blah, blah, blah, blah.
In other words, right now, as of this moment, a lot of the material that's come out in terms of news reports is pretty true and on target.
After this, the spin control is definitely going to go in and they're going to start distorting the whole issue like Bill Maher was doing, like saying it was only 12 people.
It wasn't only 12 people.
I mean, you're talking about a big auditorium.
You know, it's 360 degrees around in terms of the audience.
So you never saw all of who was doing what, particularly because a lot of times they weren't doing close-ups of those people on the camera.
So you would have a shot where they would see what was going on on the platform, but there would be people behind the camera doing things, people beyond the camera view to the left doing things.
They never did see what was going on unless they were actually there.
Marshall, since you're so involved with this, let me ask you a speculative question.
The Secretary General of the UN, as you know, is sort of making this last-ditch mission to Baghdad to talk to Saddam.
Is it your impression that this is just going through the motions and we're going to war, or do you think there is a very real possibility that he'll come back with some kind of solution?
unidentified
There may be, he may come back with some kind of solution.
Madeleine Albright, though, and Sandy Berger kept hinting at it's got to be practically everything we want though.
But this is one thing I will remind you is that before, I remember early in the Clinton administration where it looked like we were going to go to war against Korea and we looked at we were going to go to war against Haiti, although we did invade Haiti, but it was like it wasn't really a war.
I mean we just kind of went in there.
But at the last minute, people came in and kind of like cooled things out and we didn't really do that.
And so this may be one of those situations where maybe the UN Secretary General can actually accomplish something maybe.
But see, I don't know after what happened on Columbus Day, Saddam may just laugh at the whole thing and just kind of like blow him off.
Yeah, after what happened in Columbus today, Saddam may just kind of blow off the U.N. Secretary General and, you know, and feel like he doesn't really have to worry about it.
But what he should realize is that Clinton's going to, if Clinton really wants to go ahead and do this and attack Iraq, he'll do it.
But I'll tell you something else.
A lot of people were afraid of what might happen if he did do it in terms of other kinds of things that might go into action, like a chain of reaction kind of a thing in response to that, like counter terrorism attacks against the United States.
Would any other countries maybe come to Saddam's aid?
Those kind of things.
And so there was a lot of questions about how good of an alliance or coalition do we have this time, because there's a lot of reports that none of the countries over there near Iraq want us to do it.
Right, you know, and people were bringing these kind of issues.
So, I mean, all of it was like, you know, there was people concerned on all different points of this particular issue so that there wasn't any kind of a, you know, they had no group that was definitely for them.
Even the people that said, well, if we have to do it, let's do it, had concerns and problems with what the plan was.
And that the American people on this issue, with the exception of if we're going to do it, let's really do it, are utterly divided.
unidentified
I'll tell you one side of the added to this whole feeling.
There's the ABC special on what the CIA was doing is trying to get rid of Saddam.
And when it showed that they didn't support the Democratic opposition against Saddam, and instead were trying to do a military coup to get rid of Saddam, and it failed, and they let the Democratic opposition over there get wiped out by the Iraqi army, that was like, you know, I mean, again, see, it's like most people just want to get rid of Saddam and so they don't have to do all this other stuff.
We're going to discuss cloning and much more with Dr. Ronald Klatz coming up in a moment.
Dr. Ronald Klatz is recognized as the leading authority on the science of anti-aging medicine.
Now, that's a pretty heavy statement.
Recognized as the leading authority In the science of anti-aging medicine.
He is founder and president of the nonprofit public foundation American Longevity Research Institute.
He has pioneered the exploration of new therapies for the treatment and prevention of aging-related degenerative disease.
In his capacity as the president of the Scientific Medical Society, American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, Dr. Klatz has the latest in the advances in biotechnology, preventative health care, as well as overseeing medical education programs for more than 1,500 physicians and scientists from 37 countries.
Recipient of numerous awards and achievements, such as the Invex Humanitarian Award, his research has advanced the cause of preventative health care throughout the world.
And as an advisor to several members of the U.S. Congress and other players on Capitol Hill, he has looked to for answers to the rising cost of health care in America.
So he is very well qualified to speak on the subject of aging and possible immortality.
I heard, somebody I think wrote to me about you, and they said that Dr. Klatz believes that if you can stay alive for the next 30 years, make it 30 years, that there is some great possibility that we may stop the clock at about that point.
There's a great deal of truth to that statement, Art.
The technologies that are under development right now by biomedical technology companies in the United States and around the world are bearing unbelievably exciting fruits.
Technologies that literally will allow us to reset the very genetic programming within the cells itself.
And by doing such, we will be able to eliminate most, if not all, the degenerative diseases of aging that we have come to expect as normal consequences of the aging process.
Basically, it suggested, it was a work of fiction, but it looked at those people that have had spontaneous remissions with cancer, with AIDS, with other otherwise abnormally fatal diseases, and looked to the genetic, a reason why these spontaneous remissions would occur.
And actually, it went pretty far out on a fictional limb and talked about the genetic structure of Jesus, who was said to be able to perform miracles and heal.
And it all came together in the end.
But basically, it was all centered around genetics and little switches that turn on and off.
And I'm not certain that I understand the whole thing very well.
There's a project going on right now that's very heavily funded by both the U.S. government and by the pharmaceutical industry called the Human Genome Project.
And what they're doing is they're actually mapping out all the on and off switches of all the genes in the human body.
And they're ahead of schedule.
They were supposed to be done by 2005.
It looks like they're going to be done probably by 2000, 2001.
And what that is, is it's very exciting.
We're talking about actually having a roadmap of which genes in the body control which processes, which diseases are controlled where, and how not only to detect diseases very early on,
I mean as much as 15 years before they're ever clinically apparent, but being able to create new drug therapies and new genetic therapies that will cure virtually almost every degenerative disease that mankind is heir to at this time.
And so the technologies behind this, from both genetic engineering, from hormone replacement therapy, from antioxidant supplementation, these things are very, very exciting technologies because in the laboratory what it's allowing us to do is take laboratory animals and give them an extra 50%, 75%, 100%, 200%, in some cases as much as 500% longer lifespan.
How much, at the end, when the human genome is completely mapped, how much of life extension at that point, when we can act on it, would you ascribe to genetics versus other environmental factors?
Sure, I'm happy to, but let me answer it a different way, if I could.
You know, if you lead a clean life and you exercise regularly and you eat right and you have a good attitude about the world and you drive a big car and you're nice to your neighbor and you have a dog and all those kind of good things, you can expect to live a healthful lifespan of about 75 to 85 years.
If you add on top of that optimum antioxidant protection, which goes beyond just eating right, but taking the right vitamins and nutrients, you can possibly add on another 10 years.
So you might make it to about 95 years of age in good shape.
If you add on top of that hormone replacement therapy, which you've heard in the news about DHEA and melatonin, human growth hormone, estrogen, testosterone, you may be able to make it to about 120.
Now that's probably the limit of or the maximum human lifespan that is available to most of us.
Probably another 10 to 15 years after that time, by say 2000.
2010, 2015, 2020 at the very latest, we will have reliable methods to actually reset our genetic endowment.
There are the very beginnings of this technology, these gene therapies available today, and they're being used experimentally in people who have diabetes and muscular dystrophy and some other genetic diseases.
But the tools to actually go in and reset the genes specifically to optimize your metabolism, those technologies are probably about 20 years out.
Maybe a little bit less.
I'm always, you know, I say things that sound pretty extreme, but in my history, I was the former medical editor of Longevity Magazine.
Let's say it takes another 20 years for these technologies to become full-blown.
So you'll be 72.
Now, if you take good care of yourself, you could be a great 72.
I mean, you could be running marathons if you really set your mind to it.
But let's assume that you can make it to 72 and you're intact.
You don't have a horrible degenerative disease.
You don't have a heart that's ready to fall apart.
Your brain is still mostly intact.
Then we're talking about at age 72 being able to certainly slow the aging process dramatically, though I believe that can be accomplished today, and I'll talk about that in a little bit.
But certainly be able to slow the aging process dramatically and probably almost certainly be able to turn back the clock.
Being able to take you from a 72-year-old right on back to a healthy and vital and athletic 50-year-old to a 45-year-old.
Okay, well, let's look at why you age in the first place.
There are several mechanisms involved, but one of the major mechanisms involved in why you age is that the hormonal messages that tell your cell what speed to be at, that control kind of the thermostat within your cell, these are hormonal in nature.
These are controlled by things such as thyroid hormone, by insulin, by human growth hormone, by testosterone.
You know, even though, you know, men do thrive on testosterone, there's still some estrogen that affects the cells.
I mean, there's a whole symphony of hormones that are secreted by the endocrine system and also from the brain that basically are the pacemakers of youth.
And the difference between a young person and an old person, by and large, not completely, but to a large extent, is the amount of these hormones that are in circulation, as well as the receptivity of the cells to these hormones, how many cell receptors there are, how sensitive the cells are to these hormones.
And so a very interesting thing is going on in anti-aging medicine right now today.
It's called hormone replacement therapy.
And what we're doing is we're taking these hormones of youth and giving them to older people, and an incredible thing happens.
Older people start acting, start feeling, start performing at a younger level.
They start looking younger, feeling younger, performing at a much younger level.
Wrinkles disappear.
People's energy levels increase.
They start losing body fat effortlessly.
They start gaining lean body muscle mass and bone mass effortlessly.
Now, I always understood that at some point, maybe you can tell me what it is, from the moment we are born, at some point, more cells begin to die than are regenerated.
That's about, well, it depends on the organ system.
Your brain stops growing, you know, your nervous system stops growing early in life and you stop producing new muscle tissue as you get new muscle cells anyway very early in life.
But basically, you're in a state of catabolism by about age 25 from a metabolic point of view.
These cells lose their capacity to communicate with one another and to moderate their growth cycles, and they just grow out of control until they choke off the other cells.
Eventually, they end up killing the organism that they live in because they're just, you know, they're drawing away too much of the nutrients and too much of the blood supply.
Well, it's interesting you mention that because that is a very fertile area of research right now in anti-aging because certainly cancer cells are immortal.
And so it's the cellular control mechanisms involved in cancer that are very exciting areas for those of us in anti-aging medicine to study so that we can learn how to turn on and turn off the different cells of our body and perhaps regrow new brain tissue, regrow new muscle tissue, regrow new organs, and also how to interrupt the process of cancer, how to turn off that cell, that runaway cell division.
Well, that's also one of the reasons why I write in, well, I have several books out, but I write in my books that we expect to have cancer essentially controlled within the next 15 to 20 years because we're now looking at new drugs that do just that, that are able to reach in and control the cellular mechanisms of cancer and actually turn on the brakes, so to speak, with these cancerous growths.
And these are controlling compounds and controlling chemicals for the cells of the body.
So we're looking forward to a much brighter future in the cancer picture in the very near future.
And insofar as hydrogen sulfate is able to kind of get around that problem, these people are able to maintain their nutritional balance and give themselves a fighting chance or give their immune systems a fighting chance because many of the people who have had these remissions from cancer have come back from the later stages of cancer because the body, cancer is a very tricky item.
And cancers are able to mass themselves from the immune system of our bodies.
That's how they're able to grow unfettered.
And it's sometimes in the latest stages of cancer when cancer suddenly the immune systems kick in and are able to start fighting the cancer effectively.
So anything that improves nutrition for cancer patients is really a positive effect.
Doctor, I don't want to bore in and stay on the subject, but with regard to hydrazine sulfate, do you think, as you know, Bob Guccioni from Penthouse, I've had him on the air several times along, I might add, with Dr. Gold, make claims that would seem to suggest that hydrazine sulfate can do a lot more than just prevent wasting,
though that is the main claim, but that it can actually cause remission, or would you think that the effect of the hydrazine sulfate would simply be to strengthen the immune system, causing spontaneous remission in some cases, or what?
There's a lot of controversy regarding this issue.
There are claims made by Dr. Golden and Bob Guccion that the National Cancer Institute has been suppressing information, that the studies that were sponsored by the NCI were flawed.
I'll tell you one thing, though, is that in 25 years of the war on cancer, we've made pitiful little headway when the answers are pretty clear what does work.
And I think what is the unspoken success story with regard to the cancer problem is early detection.
There are techniques out there where you can detect cancer when it's no larger than the head of a pin and when a cure is easily and readily available.
And I'm not talking about five-year survival.
I'm talking about a cure.
It's a big difference.
When the NCI or the American Cancer Society or most doctors talk about treatment of cancer, they're talking about five-year survivals.
In other words, the progress that they're talking about is really more of a PR spin with regard to five-year survival rates than it is with we've found a cure.
If you look at the actual improvements in cancer therapy, the story is very dismal.
I mean, there has been almost no improvement.
The only real improvements that have been seen are with breast cancer, and that is because of the very early detection technology with mammography, with mass screening through mammography.
Well, I think that early detection really is an answer.
From my read of it and certainly from the members of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, there are now 4,000 members of the Academy, all physicians and scientists from 40 different countries around the world.
We're strong believers in very early detection because, again, cancer caught at stage one is 90% curable.
Stage one is when a cancer is about the size of a P or smaller.
And that sounds very, very small.
But we do have the technology now to detect it.
There are blood tests that can detect cancer almost anywhere in the body.
And there is new imaging technology with MRIs and with the new types of breast cancer detection methods and other advanced technology that can spot these things when they're early.
When they're that early, you can take a needle and put a needle into that tumor and irradiate it with a laser or just heat the needle or just inject some liquid nitrogen to freeze the tumor and it's gone and it's gone forever and that's a cure.
And that's really the promise of the future of cancer therapy is its early detection.
Spending the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that we spent on trying to cure cancer up to this point has been by and large a waste and the only bright spot in the whole picture is this work that we talked about earlier with cellular control of the cancer itself or of all the cells of the body.
No, I believe that, you know, I think that we will be able to change the color of our eyes with genetic engineering, but that's, again, 20 years in the future.
Before we leave that topic, far closer in what way and through what avenue, and as long as we're on the subject, this cocktail mixture they're giving to AIDS patients now that seems Magic Johnson, for example, AIDS now is not detectable, HIV is not detectable in his blood any longer.
Well, we're far closer than most people realize with regards to treatment for AIDS, and that's because of these protease inhibitor drugs that are part of this chemical cocktail.
Usually it's a three-drug cocktail to inhibit the reproduction of AIDS.
It's not a cure, not a cure yet, but it's drawing close.
What it does is it suppresses the virus to the point where it becomes virtually undetectable.
The problem with it becoming a cure is, and that's the next step, is the virus hides out within the white blood cells of the body.
And it goes into a remission kind of state.
It goes into a dormant state.
And so what we have to do with the next step is find those white blood cells and find those reservoirs of the virus and eradicate those.
And then we will have a cure for the, you know, for AIDS.
I, along with a gazillion other people in this country, came down with this god-forsaken flu.
I came down with the flu, and it was always my contention that when you get the flu, there's nothing you can do.
You drink liquids, you do the basics, and you wait until it leaves you.
This was the worst I've ever had in my life, and so I finally gave in, and I went to the doctor, and when I went to the doctor, he said, why the hell weren't you here last week?
I said, for what?
I mean, what can you really do?
And he gave me antiviral medicine.
And he said, didn't you know that we've got antiviral medicines now?
And, doctor, in two days, I was a million percent better.
I couldn't believe it.
I didn't think you could do anything with the flu.
If you watch the news, CNN, and the networks on a daily basis, you will, with regard to nutrition and what's good and bad for you, you will go out of your mind.
Milk, butter, coffee, wine, fat, meat, you name it, one day they're good for us.
The next day, they cause breast cancer.
Drink red wine, it's great for you.
Don't drink red wine, you'll get breast cancer.
And with nearly every food product that I could imagine, day to day, the information is contrary.
When it gets to be a third study from three separate laboratories, from three separate groups, on people, not on mice, not in a test tube, not on goldfish or planaria, then you can say, hmm, this is looking interesting.
And you may want to incorporate that into your own lifestyle.
Oh, I think an aspirin a day is very, very strong science.
There are at least two dozen major studies on aspirin in humans that are out there in the literature.
I suspect there's more than that, but last time I looked, there was two dozen major, I'm talking about large studies, thousands of people.
Right.
And aspirin is really, truly a wonder drug.
It can reduce the risk of heart disease, it can reduce the risk of stroke, and it may very well reduce the incidence of colon cancer as well.
Really?
Yes.
Now there's a caveat to that.
Some people are sensitive to aspirin, and certainly those people shouldn't be taking it willy-nilly.
Aspirin can thin the blood, and if you have a bleeding problem, you know, you should be careful about it.
Hopefully, you have a doctor who's as well-read about these things as you are and can give you good advice on whether you're a good candidate for taking aspirin.
Doctor, let's say that in 30 years we get to the point where we can keep people alive more or less indefinitely or even increase lifespan by, say, 300%.
It comes down to how much you enjoy life and if you feel that you've accomplished all that you need to on this planet.
I think the greatest tragedy is for someone to die before their time.
We're all here for a purpose.
Some of us have a more important, or not more important, but a bigger purpose than others.
And I'm not ready to go silently into that long night until I've accomplished everything that I need to accomplish.
And I figure for myself I'll take about 150 years at a minimum.
And when that time comes and I've done all that I need to do, then I'd like to give my good friend Dr. Jack Kvorkin a call on the phone and ask him to come over for a visit and a house call.
I had a very good friend who lived close to me here who had terminal cancer and liver disease and, you know, he was a wreck and coming to the end of it all and was alone at home.
And they had visiting physicians who would come and give him shots of morphine toward the end.
And it is my firm belief that the dosage of morphine in the end is what caused him to expire.
How common a practice is that on the QT, on the quiet, between physicians and patients in America today?
Well, 20 years ago, or perhaps even less, it was a very common practice.
And I believe that that was probably, I personally believe that was probably one of the major responsibilities of your personal physician to guarantee that you would not suffer needlessly, especially in the very last hours of life.
However, because of the drug paranoia that has been foisted upon the American public by our government, physicians, rightfully so, are scared to death over losing their license for treating people who are in pain with adequate, and I say that again, with adequate amounts of analgesic medication.
There is such an onerous weight on physicians with triplicate prescription forms and special, special, special licenses and oversight by the state and by the federal government and by their own medical societies on virtually every pain medication or certainly every narcotic-based pain medication that they write for,
that many doctors, in fact most doctors won't even write for narcotic-based pain medications any longer.
And the ones who will write for it are so timid in their prescribing practices that many people suffer horrible pain needlessly and without any good reason whatsoever under the guise that somehow they will become addicted or they will have some, you know, they'll enjoy the experience of pain relief too much.
Actually, some of the doctors I have been to, even dentists, have told me exactly the same thing, that they have no problem at all prescribing narcotics for real pain, but that they are under immense pressure not to do so by the DEA, and the DEA watches them like a hawk.
Every pain prescription, every narcotic pain prescription that's written in the United States is on the computer and you are on the radar screen immediately.
And the pharmacists in America have been co-opted into becoming mini-DEA agents and are encouraged to report physicians who prescribe medications perhaps a little bit more than their colleagues and even patients who are receiving those pain medications.
Any patient who has had the misfortune to require narcotic pain medications, who's walked into a pharmacy, I'm sure has had that wonderful, warm feeling of being looked at as if they were a dope addict and a criminal.
Certainly in the big cities.
And again, I'm not putting the blame on the pharmacists.
They are really under pressure just as the physicians are.
And my guest is Dr. Ronald Platts, recognized as the world's leading authority on the science of anti-aging.
He says, make it another 20 or 30 years, and we make it to the point where we can make you virtually immortal.
And that's what we've been talking about.
And before we leave that, I do have a couple of other questions, and then we're going to talk about cloning.
When you think about the future and watch the stock market, what do you think?
Things getting better or worse?
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Will it turn down at some point, inevitably?
What goes up comes down.
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All right, back now to Dr. Ronald Klatz near Chicago, an interesting place lately for science and medicine.
Doctor, somebody rightly faxes me and says, look, before you leave the whole concept of stopping aging and immortality, you've got one area you've really got to cover, and that is we've got to make it through the next 20 or 30 years to get to that point.
And so it's important to ask you what vitamins we should be taking, what type and quantity of minerals we should be taking, what kind of quality of hormones, quantities like the EHEA, aspirin.
In other words, Doctor, what can we do to get through the next 20 or 30 years necessary to get to this wonderful genetic explosion of immortality?
Okay, well, the first thing you have to do is you have to arm yourself with knowledge.
And that comes from reading the literature, and that comes probably from being a member of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, which is the Society of Physicians and Scientists, also available to the general public.
And we have a website which has over 1,000 pages of information.
Now, if you can't get to our website, which is worldhealth.net, your listeners can call the Academy of Anti-Aching Medicine in Chicago, and the number, may I use that?
Well, they can become a member of the Academy, and they'll get our newsletter.
They'll also get reading lists.
They'll also be put in touch with physicians in their areas or clinics in their areas that are practicing this new science of anti-aging medicine.
Interestingly, in your own backyard is a center, which is perhaps the most advanced anti-aging center in the United States right now.
It's an organization called Cenagenix, and they're in Las Vegas, Nevada, and they are a leading center that's focused on hormone replacement therapy for anti-aging purposes.
And they're utilizing all the different hormones, but especially human growth hormone, specifically for anti-aging purposes.
Well, you'll have to get a physician's prescription for it.
But interestingly enough, human growth hormone has just been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in people who are suffering from aging-related disease.
No, but if you're a woman and you're postmenopausal, just this last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association was really a landmark study that showed that women who are postmenopausal who take estrogen replacement therapy have 50% less incidence of degenerative diseases of aging across the board.
Less osteoporosis, less heart disease, less wrinkling of the skin, less problems with dryness of the mucous membrane, and even less Alzheimer's disease.
Not only do they have less degenerative diseases of aging, by as much as 50% less, but they also have a longer lifespan.
And so the largest study in the history of science is the 10 million women who are out there taking hormone replacement therapy right now, estrogen replacement therapy, and they're having less degenerative disease and they're living longer, and that's according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
That doesn't validate anti-aging therapies, so I don't know what does.
Testosterone is probably just as important, but not as well studied as estrogen, because not nearly as many men are taking testosterone replacement therapy.
Also, interestingly, some recent studies have shown, you know, we've been very concerned about taking hormone replacement therapy, or at least testosterone, because of prostate disease.
Turns out that the men who are getting prostate disease actually have lower testosterone levels than normal.
So the whole idea behind anti-aging hormone replacement therapy is not to make people into supermen, but to give people just enough to bring them back to a normal, youthful, healthy level.
Make sure that your body weight is within 10% of ideal.
You don't have to get crazy and go to ideal body weight, which is very hard for most elderly people to achieve.
But even 10% above ideal body weight is not an increased risk for premature death.
As a matter of fact, there's some studies that say that even 20% above ideal body weight is not an increased risk for premature death as long as you exercise on a regular and routine basis.
Exercise is incredibly important.
Exercise is probably the number one anti-aging therapy that's available to each and every one of us.
Well, you know, I always wanted to be a vegetarian, but I just like my steak a little too much on the rare side.
I suppose there's a good argument against eating red meat on a regular basis because much red meat does have a number of hormones in it.
There is some increased risk For certain cancers, if you eat a lot of red meat, and especially if it's charred too heavily.
But I think red meat in moderation probably has no significant increased risk of premature death, and probably there's some benefit to it because there are certain nutrients that are found in meats that are very hard to come by in a vegetarian diet.
You hear a lot of preaching all over the place about minerals and how we need to replace minerals in our body that we are not getting now through natural means like the water and all the rest of it.
I think that the lesson that I've learned from anti-aging and looking at demographic studies is that everything in moderation, that's the truest words, and Shakespeare spoke them.
I'm sure someone before Shakespeare had it say it, but it's absolutely true in medicine and it's true in life.
And I think it will also turn out to be true in anti-aging as well.
Every year, I'm told that we get 390,000 or 400,000 smoking-related deaths.
And I have always been very dubious of the way they arrive at these figures.
For example, back east, if you spend a lot of time in your basement, you're going to be irradiated because there's radiation coming from the ground.
Yes, that's true.
And that may well result in a lung cancer, for example.
Now, when this person's death certificate is made out, I wouldn't be surprised, but they put down smoking-related if the person happened to be a smoker and they had lung cancer, whether it actually came from the smoke or the ground.
Well, important minerals that we're finding, again, are deficient in the American diet are both magnesium and potassium.
Magnesium is important for heart action.
It's important for action of the enzyme systems of the body.
And supplementing with magnesium and calcium and potassium can be very helpful for people with heart disease or people in general.
I think what we're finding with anti-aging therapeutics is that when we look at individuals, no two people are the same.
We're all as different biochemically as are our fingerprints.
And so the optimal anti-aging program for UART would be entirely different than the optimal anti-aging program for me or for your neighbor or for the guy down the street.
And so what we're doing with anti-aging medicine is we're doing a thing called the biomarker biomatrix analysis.
And what it is is it's a battery of several hundred different biochemical tests that look at each person individually and try and design a program that's unique and addresses each of their deficiencies, both hormonal, nutritional, biochemical, and their risk factors.
Well, they're the ones who are getting a benefit of anti-aging medicine, though it's not very expensive to get started on the anti-aging medicine program.
But anti-aging medicine is becoming a national issue.
It's an issue of national defense and national security, anti-aging medicine, because if we don't embrace the anti-aging lifestyle, if we don't embrace the anti-aging technology, our nation is doomed to become a nation of nursing homes when in the year 2025 there will be two 65-year-olds For every young teenager in America.
The baby boomers are such a large cohort of the population, they will suck up every dime of social services that are out there and literally bankrupt America unless we change the paradigm of aging.
And as a matter of fact, I was in Washington, D.C., giving this testimony before members of Congress and their staff through the National Defense Council Foundation in Washington.
And we were talking about this as a national issue of national defense.
As a matter of fact, Greenspan is saying that the cure for Social Security is to, in fact, push back the years by which you can obtain Social Security.
Instead of obtaining it at 65, you'll have to wait until 67 or even 70 if you're born today.
And in order for that to occur, what has to happen?
We have to change the paradigm of aging so that people are no longer old at 70 where they need Social Security, so that they're still young, healthy, productive, and vibrant, so that at 70 they feel as good as any 45-year-old does today, and they don't want to retire because why would they?
Then the best argument of all, and that is our environment.
Look at our air, look at the air above our cities, look at the pollution of our rivers and streams, the ozone depletion that's letting all this radiation in from the sun that's giving us skin cancers and killing frogs and God knows what all.
You're talking about having a lot more people on the Earth for a lot longer time, Doctor.
Do you realize that in the United States, the latest reports from the U.S. Census Bureau is that birth, live birth of American citizens is at the lowest point in history.
It's now 1.3 per couple.
That is well below replacement level, replacement level being about 2.1, 2.2 per couple.
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Roger Fredenberg Radio is a regular guy here, and I just want you folks to know that I know that you're the laughter.
I know people say, oh, you're funny, but I know the difference between laughing at someone and laughing with someone.
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Hi, I'm Bever Ray, inviting you to join me for the new Veggie Life Hour, the first Wednesday of every month, right here on Here's to Your Health.
John Westergahl, the nutrition editor of Veggie Life magazine, will join me each month to help you become better educated about the power of your plate.
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Music When our apartment burned down, we didn't know where to turn.
As a Red Cross volunteer, I meet people just when they think it can't get any worse.
But something happens when they see the Red Cross.
I see it in their faces.
I have to admit, I didn't expect the Red Cross to be there for an apartment fire, but they were.
People watch us on the news at major disasters across the country.
They don't realize our local chapters are in their own neighborhoods.
After it was over, the Red Cross gave us something to eat and found us a place to spend the night.
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The first to respond with care and relief.
Count on the Red Cross to help you help your family.
Well, I'm not saying that they did it effortlessly, but they've certainly accomplished that.
And in the first world, we're not only at zero population growth, we're at minus population growth.
If it wasn't for immigration in the United States, we'd be losing population right now, as is most of the first world.
Because what we're finding is that as people live longer, have less social insecurity, expect to live into the ripe old age in good health, they don't need a huge family to support them.
And when you look at why they have huge Families, it's because their children die young and they need to have a lot of children to care for themselves in their old age because there are no social support systems.
Assuming that we reach in 20 or 30 years a virtual immortality, we will still have third world nations, the Bangladeshes, parts of India, and I really could go on and on and on.
I've seen a lot of the third world.
If this technology became available, doctor, would you now dispense it to Bangladesh?
But I believe that when people have social security and have the security of knowing that they are healthy, they don't have the desire to reproduce ad nauseum.
They have a desire to reproduce in a way that allows them and their families and their children to have an optimum lifestyle and an optimum opportunity to enjoy all the pleasures of life.
And that has been proven to be smaller families, not larger families, because that allows more resources for all the members of the family.
As a matter of fact, it's not unusual at all from a biochemical point of view.
Not from a number of candles on your birthday cake, obviously, because no one can stop time.
But we can, from a biochemical point of view, make you optimize your metabolism, optimize your health, and actually make you look and feel younger than you were when you started.
As a matter of fact, it's quite common in anti-aging clinical practice to de-age someone or biologically optimize someone by five, ten years, in some cases 15 years.
It's a fancy name for this battery of about 114 biochemical tests that we're using right now that goes through this artificial intelligence computer system.
And what we do is we measure, you know, just like when you bring your car in for a checkup, they plug it into the computer.
And they can tell us how well each organ system of the body is aging.
That's remarkable.
And when you can do that, every six months you can see a trend.
And you can see, are you aging prematurely?
Are you aging optimally?
Perhaps your heart is aging at a more rapid rate than your liver or your lungs or your kidneys, in which case we focus all of our therapies on trying to protect your heart.
To do the whole program starts with all the diagnostics and everything else, about $4,000 a year.
And if you want to add in the hormone replacement therapy, growth hormones, probably the most expensive of the group, you're up to about $10,000, $12,000 a year.
But again, what's that worth if that's going to buy you an extra six months or a year of lifespan or perhaps a whole lot more?
If we're right about being 30 years from immortality, then it's a very, very intelligent investment.
All right, on behalf of all the people out there who don't live by all the proper rules, nutrition, exercise, and all the rest of it, somebody who might smoke, eat an occasional quarter pound or that sort of thing, could they begin this regimen that you have discussed?
And when you think of a lifespan of 100 years plus, which is available, by the way, to all the baby boomers, as a matter of fact, the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, of which I'm the president, has announced this last December that 50% of the baby boomers or more will see their 100th birthday in excellent physical and mental condition.
And so when you start thinking of a lifespan in excess of 100 years, maybe far in excess of 100 years, you have to be concerned about the economy.
You have to be concerned about ecology.
You have to be concerned about the state of the planet.
You have to be concerned about your own spirituality, your relationship to your fellow man and to the universe.
And so it forces that, but even more importantly, it gives you the time.
Most of us will achieve mastery in this lifetime if we only have enough of it.
Some of us become wise at age 30.
They're the great masters.
Some of us don't become wise until we're 60.
Some until 80.
Maybe some people need to 120.
But everybody can get there.
And the promise of the ageless society and anti-aging medicine is that we all can get there if we're only willing to take a little bit of the effort to make it, to educate ourselves and to take care of ourselves so that we can benefit from these technologies that are already in the pipeline.
As a matter of fact, I understand in England, the same technologies that went into making Dolly have already been used in in vitro fertilization techniques.
And even more alarmingly, or perhaps more hopefully, depending on which end of the argument you're on, the major barriers to human cloning, which was the inavailability of female eggs.
Apparently it took 200 and some eggs, 200 and something attempts with Dolly, and they needed 200 and something eggs in order to clone Dolly.
The problem with women is women obviously ovulate one egg at a time, and even under the pressure of ovulatory drugs, you can only harvest maybe five or ten eggs at most at a time.
Well, now we're finding in the latest researches is that we may be able to use cow eggs in place of human eggs as incubators for these cloning experiments.
You take a cow egg and you ablate its own internal DNA and you replace it with the DNA of whatever you want to grow, whether that be a human being, a frog, another cow, or a chicken or whatever you're in the mood to clone.
And it turns out that the reproductive mechanisms and the hormones and the chemicals that are necessary for growth of that being are right there in the cow's egg.
And cow eggs are available plentifully because we eat cows and we slaughter them en masse.
there are literally hundreds of thousands of cow eggs available where these experiments can go on unfettered.
There are cloning experiments going on right now where they are seeking, and I believe that they've succeeded, in growing a body, a headless body, so that what you would have is you would have a sack of organs, and these organs would be available for transplantation.
And what it would mean is no one would ever have to die again of heart failure or liver failure or kidney failure because there would be a plentiful supply, an unlimited supply, of exact, genetically perfect organs for whoever might need them.
Well, all right, you should know who you're listening to.
Dr. Ronald Klatz is recognized as the leading authority, period, on the science of anti-aging.
He is founder and president of the nonprofit public foundation, American Longevity Research Institute.
And we are now discussing cloning, which of course is it I'm a little bit cynical about government in general.
And it would be my view that this technology, the cloning of human beings, for example, probably either in a private or black ops government lab someplace or another, Already has been done.
As a matter of fact, the president is signing something or doing something, executive ordering or something or another, and he's trying to stop it cold.
Well, you know, I can't control that, and I would love to see, you know, all these technologies, everything from nuclear energy to computer technology to human cloning, be used for good and light.
So a law that bans cloning, does that protect us from the evildoers, or does that simply stop the people who would do good from developing this technology?
But you can command incredible power thanks to modern technology, electronic technologies.
Well, this same logarithmic increase in power is happening now in biomedical technology, and it will lead to incredibly wonderful developments and maybe some scary developments.
While what you said about me is absolutely true, I feel a horrible weight of responsibility and worry and concern about the reach and the amount of power I have because of the number of people that I'm able to address.
You stop them from limiting the power, from keeping the power from everyone?
I think the safest thing is what the Forefathers of America understood about political power.
The most benefit for the greatest good of the people was to take the power of the Republic and put it into as many hands as they could through the vote and through a tripartite government.
And I think the same is true with electronic power, you know, having people access to the Internet, having people being able to reach out and communicate freely with the touch of a button, and perhaps by taking this biomedical technology and putting it in as many hands as possible so that no one person or one group has a monopoly of power,
whether it be power of cloning or power of immortality or power of life extension or just power over any aspect of our lives.
If you could switch heads, if you can grow a clone without a head and you can virtually take your head and put it on that clone, that can be done someday.
Yes.
You are then a new human being except that your brain from me.
So what about the brain?
What is the life, assuming other bodily functions remain young and youthful and are brand new?
Well, the brain is a very interesting organ, and we're just beginning to fathom the depth of the brain as an organ itself.
Until about 15, 20 years ago, we had not even a clue as to how the brain actually worked.
And we're just now beginning to develop some reasonable understanding of what is going on with the brain.
It's an incredibly complex organ.
With regard to longevity, the brain probably has, under optimal conditions, has a lifespan well in excess of 120, well we know it has a life expectancy well in excess of 120 years.
But we are working on technologies now where we can actually do brain transplants, where we can actually transplant little pieces of brain tissue into our own.
Yes, don't you recall the work done in people with Parkinson's disease?
Fetal tissue or sometimes pieces of the supragrenal gland from the kidney.
And implanting that into the brain of people who have Parkinson's disease who have that area of the brain that's responsible for making dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter, in Parkinson's disease, that portion of the brain dies off, and they don't have enough dopamine, and they undergo these uncontrollable jerky movements.
Well, the brain dies because of many different things.
Toxins, too much alcohol, as a natural course of aging, and also decreased blood flow.
We're finding that perhaps a significant portion of Alzheimer's disease is due to diminished blood flow.
You know, we develop, as we grow older, our arteries start to clog up, and our capillaries, which are microscopic arteries, clog up first.
And when they start to clog and no longer produce, deliver the proper nutrients to the organs, whether it be the kidneys or the brain, those portions of that tissue that are starved for blood flow start to die off very slowly.
And that may be the initiating event that leads to a significant portion of Alzheimer's disease.
This is an area that's being explored thoroughly right now.
And there is some promise to it.
You may remember the story about ginkgo biloba that was in the news just a couple weeks ago?
It actually improves cerebral blood flow, and for people who are elderly, who have a lack of blood flow to the brain, there is an improvement in cognition, and there is an improvement in mood, and there is an improvement in energy levels.
I mean, we're talking about a man who is prepared to take us into immortality, a man who believes that cloning is a proper road to follow if we do it the right way, and a man who believes that when life has been satisfied, when a person is satisfied with their life, that ending it Dr. Kvorkian style is okay.
So I had to ask you this question.
unidentified
Well, a soul as in a separate energy ethereal identity.
I believe that there is a certain, that there is a place for every human being and we have a role to fulfill.
And I like to believe that there may, in fact, be something beyond this physical existence, though I don't have any clue what that might be, and I haven't seen much evidence to convince me that there is much else.
There have been many who have talked of near-death experiences in which they go down a tunnel toward a great white light, meet relatives and all the rest of it.
Yes.
When you get together with other doctors and you talk about these kinds of reports, and there are thousands and thousands of them, how do you rationalize this phenomenon?
Well, the scientists that I deal with, and we do discuss these issues, you know, it's very exciting, you know, these are very exciting reports, except that something that throws a clinker into the whole issue of the near-death experience is the reports of fighter pilots who are trained in centrifuge training.
These giant centrifuges and they put into it to simulate G-forces.
And when you take someone to the brink of unconsciousness in a centrifuge, they're not near death.
They're just undergoing unconsciousness.
They report almost identical experiences.
And what that tends to argue for is that in the process of dying, the brain, perhaps very kindly, undergoes these hallucinations that relieve you from the fear of death and from the pain of death and what goes along with it.
As the brain starts to die, it releases, There are electrochemical reactions that occur where the brain, you see, the brain just doesn't shut down like you'd shut off a light switch.
The brain starts to die as a firecracker would explode.
And in that process of these little explosions, these little biochemical firecrackers going off within the brain, it would be very reasonable to assume that there might be hallucinations or there might be seizures or there might be all sorts of altered states that occur in that process.
And I'm very familiar with that because what I do for a living, anti-aging medicine is a pursuit and is an ab vocation.
My vocation is I'm involved in a biotechnology company that has taken that suspended animation surgery technique and collapsed it down into a briefcase-sized emergency medicine device that can be brought into the field as in war or in ambulances and can plug into a person's carotid arteries and put the brain on hold in a state of hypothermia.
And essentially allow the emergency medical personnel instead of five minutes to resuscitate an individual, because that's how long they have before their brain dies inextricably, once they're plugged in, they could be kept in a state of suspended animation for as long as an hour.
There is technology afoot that's being pursued right now in England by British Telecom, a computer chip that will essentially record every visual experience and auditory experience you have throughout life.
Well, you've got to remember what can be downloaded can be uploaded.
That's true.
Now, if clones are possible, and they are, then if you were able to, in essence, download the contents of your brain, what would stop a scientist or a person of medicine like yourself from then, in effect, uploading this to a clone's brain, doctor?
One kind of gory little question before the bottom of the hour, very quickly.
When we die, Doctor, as I said, we have no idea what happens.
When a person is clinically dead, no pulse, no respiration, no breathing, no anything, is it probable that they're still mentally, in some sense, alive?
Dr. Ronald Flats, the world's leading authority on the science of anti-aging, is my guest.
And we're exploring the limits, the outer limits.
Not so far out, though, really.
And yes, we're going to open up the lines now.
I have not run out of questions by a long shot, but it's your turn.
So if you have questions, come now.
From the Associated Press.
A Senate bill to ban human cloning was put on indefinite hold Wednesday when lawmakers From both parties expressed concerns that it could slow scientific research despite overwhelming opposition to the idea of human cloning.
Supporters of the bill, promoted by the Republican leadership, could muster only 42 votes for a motion to bring the legislation to the Senate floor well short of the 60 needed.
Listen to this.
Among those Republicans, two spoke of diseases that had affected their own families and the importance of keeping all avenues open for new treatment.
Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican from South Carolina, said his daughter had diabetes.
And, quote, I'm concerned this bill may be written so broadly it will restrict future promising research, which could lead to improved treatment, end quote.
Cloning is a very powerful technology, and it has an incredible potential for doing incredible good.
I mean, cloning could essentially eliminate the organ shortage, period.
Cloning could lead to an unlimited supply of blood, unlimited supply of stem cells, unlimited supply of immune stimulants, and as well as new drug therapies.
I mean, the potential of cloning hasn't even been scratched yet.
You mentioned earlier that baby boomers will have an unlimited demand for whatever government social services can supply.
Sounds like you're talking about what economists talk about as the concept of scarcity.
Are you familiar with the concept, and is it fair to say that you're more of a free market advocate than an advocate of kind of going towards star trick socialism?
Then there's really no getting away from the fact, though, that anti-aging and cloning technology are going to be available to those of means, correct?
There probably will be, when cloning becomes commercially available, there probably will be organizations such as Baxter International or the American Red Cross or any people, probably the people who are doing blood banking now, will be doing organ banking.
And what they will do is they will grow clones of various different HLA types or genetic types to be freely available if people should need organs for transplant.
Perhaps an even better method would be to grow your own clone and keep it somewhere until such time as you needed it, though that would probably be an expensive venture.
unidentified
I agree.
I just have these horrid visions of like pickle jars all in a row.
Well, you know, we do it now with blood, and we do it now with bone marrow, and we do it with bone, and we do it with all kinds of other bodily tissues.
Cloning is really an extension of blood banking, or at least organs from clones.
Well, doctor, do you remember, and the movie won't come to me, and please everybody don't fax it to me, but there was a movie, a medical movie, some years ago, and at the very end they walked into this room where all of these bodies were essentially hanging in hammocks.
I have gone blind from glaucoma, but the underlying cause of this is something called Rieger's syndrome.
And through the genome program, they've been able to map out what's gone wrong and where the Riegers lies.
So, my question lies in, first off, regeneration.
We're talking about the central nervous system here, the optic nerve in my case.
Regeneration versus development of, first off, preventing something like Riegers, and secondly, for people who already have that or who are blind, undoing it.
Either regenerating the optic nerve and or the eye.
Well, the Human Genome Project, which has apparently marked out the gene pathway that leads to this disease, that now allows for early detection.
So certainly we can detect people who are going to develop this disease earlier in life, so intervention can be taken if, in fact, there is an intervention that can be effective.
Beyond that, we may be able to actually insert a change in the gene that would alter the gene such that this syndrome of blindness would not occur.
There is work going on with being able to essentially regenerate the optic nerve and be able to do essentially eye transplants, though it's at its very early stages, and no one has achieved great success.
There's a researcher at University of New York who has been able to take a mouse and essentially make an eyeball transplant work in the mouse, but the only thing he's been able to prove is that the mouse could see the difference between light and dark.
He wasn't able to prove that the mouse could actually see anything beyond that.
And we're probably a ways away from being able to regenerate an eyeball, though.
I mean, we have the cloning technology.
I would imagine in a few years we could probably clone this gentleman some new eyes, but how can we make those eyes connect?
That's a little bit of a ways away.
But maybe there'll be a breakthrough.
Maybe you'll get lucky.
And in five years, when cloning technology is available, maybe there'll be a way to connect those cloned eyes.
We are quickly mapping the human genome, as you have said already.
2000, 2001 will be done.
And when we are, and before we get to another 20 or 30 years when we can actually begin to put it to practical use, there is going to be a period of time, doctor, when literally everything will be known about you with nothing more than a sample of your DNA, when you're going to get cancer, have a heart attack, whether you're alcohol-prone, violence-prone, on down the list.
They'll be able to map you as a human being, know everything there is to know.
They're already collecting blood samples from our military for that purpose.
You were very anti-law a little while ago, but I mean, we're going to have a 20 or 30-year period here where privacy with regard to your own mortality and the diseases you might get is it going to be gone.
Do there need to be interim laws preventing this kind of information from getting from people like you to insurance companies, to the government?
So even information laws become a doctor even something that would indicate that somebody in their 20s, by the time they're 30, is going to have a heart attack, hard information, you would still see that go to the insurance company, no problem.
No, no, I'm not saying I would have it go to the insurance company.
I think that a person's personal history and I think a person's personal life is their business and their business alone.
I'm not for that being shared with the insurance companies or with the government, but I am for the technology that allows that to take place because that gives the individual the opportunity to take action and prevent those diseases from occurring.
I think the most you can get is that someone has a propensity towards this disease or that disease.
Just as you might know if you were to do some sports testing in elementary school that one kid might be a better basketball player than another, you know, because he has longer levers, he has stronger legs, he has a more rapid growth spurt.
I mean, all you can tell with any of this is a propensity towards there's how much of a propensity, in other words, how sure could you be once the human genome is completely mapped that I would die by 30, heart attack, stroke, whatever?
If it's a 100% fatal genetic disorder, well, then I could be 100% sure that that was going to happen.
But most diseases are not that way.
You are not your genetics.
As a matter of fact, a genetic disease does not Kill you by the time of 30.
It generally will not kill you.
All it can do is it can contribute towards your illness or towards your disability.
For example, my dad had his first heart attack at age 42.
I have type 4 hypertriglyceridemia.
What that means is my liver is not very good at clearing cholesterol and triglycerides from my blood.
When I was 25 and in medical school, I found out this bad news, and I found out that maybe having the standard American diet, a balanced diet of equal quantities of Coca-Cola and Twinkies, was not doing my heart a whole lot of good.
My cholesterol was over 300, and my triglycerides was approaching 500.
And I, at age 42, when my dad had his first heart attack, and by the way, my sister had a triple bypass last year, and women are protected from heart disease until after the menopause.
I have a cardiac CT examination, a rapid CT, a computerized x-ray of my heart every year, and my arteries are whistle-clean.
And the reason for that is because I knew my flawed genetics early enough where I was able to take intervention.
And by taking some antioxidants, by watching my diet just a little bit, and by taking some thyroid and some niacin, I was able to interrupt the genetic problem that would have taken many years off of my life otherwise.
I'd say at most people will have no more than half and perhaps as little as a third of their health expectancy controlled by genetics, unless they are one of the very few unlucky individuals who have a terminal genetic disorder and that will kill them early in life.
But still, the promise of genetic research of becoming practical is that even these things that are not controlled by genetics can be cured by genetics.
Everything has a genetic component to it, but how much of a genetic component?
The point of the matter is that these, you know, if you can go in and control the metabolism of the cell, control the actual mechanisms of life, it's like reaching into your computer and flipping those flip switches on your central processor.
In other words, obviously, Doctor, we could and no doubt would clone the perfect soldier, the perfect physical specimen, the testosterone-loaded giant who would be a killing machine.
The technologies certainly exist for that to happen.
And when you look at the Olympics, you can see just how excellent a human body can be trained and can be made to be with optimum genetics and optimum training methods.
But isn't there going to be a race, just like there's been a race to the moon and a race to do this and that, there's going to be a cloning race for national security reasons?
Well, they'll get on a mailing list, and they'll be offered an opportunity to become a member of the Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.
They'll be receiving literature from the organization, a newsletter.
They'll be able to subscribe to different scientific journals, and they'll be able to be put in touch with medical clinics around the country, around the world, and physicians all over the world who are practicing this new science of anti-aging medicine.
Dr. Ronald Klatz is my guest, recognized as the leading authority on the science of anti-aging.
We're discussing that.
We're discussing cloning and many other things out on the edge.
Once again, here is Dr. Klatz.
And Doctor, I've got a story here from the Electronic Telegraph, UK News of Great Britain, that says the first gene that influences human intelligence has now been found by scientists, a discovery with a huge social and educational implication.
The research could herald the development of genetic tests to target potential high flyers, pave the way to IQ boosting smart drugs, and raise fears, of course, that embryos that lack smart genes could be aborted.
Are we, in your opinion, this is another subjective sort of question, but in your opinion, are we socially prepared to handle the speed at which we are moving technologically?
I think it's something that we just let happen to us, and I think that it's something that's going to have to become an issue for our society.
Because things are happening at such an incredible pace.
Most people don't have a clue as to what's going on that's affecting their lives, their children's lives, and that's affecting not just this life, but the next life they're going to have, or the next life after that they're going to have.
There is a project ongoing in Japan, has been for the last almost 10 years, and it's specifically also at UCLA in California.
And it is to integrate a microchip with human nerve tissue.
And this is very early stage development.
I don't know how far they've gone with it.
I didn't see that particular piece on CNN.
But the idea is that if you can interface the digital with the cerebral and create a digital cerebral interface, you will then be able to accomplish a number of very interesting, very positive and also very frightening events.
You will be able to essentially log on to your computer directly through your brain.
Just like in that movie with, oh, it was a very popular movie out science fiction just earlier last year where the fellow had the, you know, electrodes they put into his brain.
He was able to download all this information from a computer.
And uploading is when we will eventually, if technology continues to move ahead at its current pace, we will be able to upload our essentially the total volume of our thoughts, our feelings, our memories, our inclinations, our intellect into some supercomputer somewhere and essentially make a duplicate copy of our persona.
If you're a basic scientist and you're a you know and you break things down to the least common denominator, you would argue perhaps that if you're a materialist in science, you might argue that consciousness is a function of complexity.
And that when you get enough of these individual units together, enough bits and pieces, enough processing power together, that consciousness evolves out of that power of computing.
There are others who argue that consciousness is an individual item akin to the soul.
I'm hoping that that will occur in my own lifetime, because if that's the case, then truly immortality of the conscious, of our consciousness, immortality of our persona will be achievable when we're able to download our personalities onto a chip.
And wouldn't that create a rather interesting reality akin to perhaps early scriptures of heaven on earth when we will in fact be able to be omniscient?
When we can have that digital cerebral interface, we will be omniscient.
We will live truly forever.
And we will be all-knowing, and we will be able to merge our consciousness with those of many others, perhaps of millions of others.
To me, it's interesting to note that a mere hundred years ago, for what you're saying now, or its equivalent then, they would have put you on a large wooden cross with a bunch of kindling wood under you.
What I wanted to say was that I have always been enamored with longevity.
I always keep up on the Gennis book of, you know, world records, and I have all kinds of articles and stuff.
What I wanted to say is that from the very, you know, you were talking about anti-aging, I like to believe that I know that everyone grows old and their skin gets, you know, older and all this and that, but I like to think that a lot of it can be done internally with the brain.
So sort of, the thoughts that you think surge through your body and, you know, your – Doctor, people are said to be able to cure themselves of disease with mental processes.
Absolutely.
I think we know that people given sugar pills who are told that it will cure their illness more times than not, it does because they believe that it will.
The mind is a very, very powerful tool, and it is the master regulatory organ, not just through the nervous system, but through the endocrine system for the entire body.
The mind controls, the brain controls our immune system.
unidentified
And the immune system is really what keeps us from being diseased.
They're very much like the ends of your shoelaces, the little plastic tips on the ends that keep the shoelaces from fraying.
And these telomeres are perhaps one of the important biological clocks of the body.
And it's thought that you can reset those biological clocks by adding telamerase, which is an enzyme, to the body, to the cells.
Now, that has not been done except experimentally, but there is some reason to believe that we may be able to reset the clocks of our body.
Also, it's interesting that cancer cells have large amounts of this telamerase enzyme, which is responsible to some degree for their immortalized activity.
We had talked about how human growth hormone has just been approved for adults by the FDA for aging-related disorders because as you grow older, the amount of human growth hormone drops.
And we're finding that when you give human growth hormone to elderly individuals, an interesting thing happens.
Their bodies start to change and they become more youthful.
They develop stronger organs.
Their heartbeat is stronger.
They develop more muscle mass.
They lose fat mass effortlessly.
And there are clinics all over the country now that are setting up, anti-aging clinics, that are administering human growth hormones specifically for anti-aging purposes.
But I mean, if I want to get out of my doctor's office with a prescription for anti-aging hormone, so what do I say to them other than to have them call and join if I just want to get out of there with a prescription?
Well, probably the best way to get on a program of anti-aging therapy is to contact the academy and find a physician.
We have several hundred doctors who are practicing this way.
Go to one of them already.
And if you can find a doctor in your area who's practicing anti-aging medicine, then go out and get a copy of a book called Stopping the Clock or Grow Young with HGH, Human Growth Hormone.
They're available in bookstores all over the country.
Stopping the Clock is about all the therapies that are available in anti-aging, including nutrition and hormone therapy and exercise and diet and everything else, and Grow Young with HH is specifically hormone replacement therapy.
He's in Chicago, anti-aging, cloning, all those edgy things that we're getting so close to or on top of right now.
That's what we're talking about.
We'll get right back to him.
All right, to forestall lots and lots of requests, please, everybody.
If you want a copy of this program, you can get it by calling 1-800-917-4278.
It's going to be a four-hour program, obviously.
1-800-917-4278.
Now, once again, Dr. Ronald Klatz, Doctor, as these technologies become, just start to become available, anti-aging, eventually immortality, cloning, they at first are going to be very expensive and available to the few rather than the many.
And of course, that then will fairly rapidly change.
And like VCRs and everything else, it'll get cheaper.
Question is, when it first becomes available, who decides?
Who decides who gets the organs that are grown, who gets the new cloned body, who gets the upload, the download?
How do you make such decisions?
Who makes them?
How do we set up a little panel of gods to decide who receives the benefits?
Well, I do keep a big leather book, you know, and I have a left side of the page and a right side of the page.
It's really hard to say who's going to make these decisions.
Hopefully, we're not going to be in a position like we were when the artificial kidney was first invented, where there had to be, you know, because of the lack of this technology, literally there was ethics panels that were set up to decide who got dialysis and who didn't, and those who didn't died.
Hopefully, the technology, you know, technology as it develops today is almost so rapid from the laboratory into our lives that I don't think we're going to be faced with a lack of availability when this technology comes on board.
I think it's going to be first utilized by the people who are at the heart of the movement, people such as myself who are, I guess, the true believers who are willing to belly up to the bar to be experimental guinea pigs with themselves.
Would it be possible with cloning to, this is rather morbid, but to go to the grave of somebody who's been in some reasonably way preserved, or even not so, obtain DNA and clone?
Well, no, I'm not sure except that I had a very, very beloved pet.
I had a fantastic airdale.
He was probably the best dog in the world.
And when he passed on, I went out and I looked for a replacement.
And there was no replacement for Lex, despite the fact that I was able to find as close to a clone as I guess you can get, because I went to the breeder, and I, you know, and the bloodlines are very well established.
And I saw a bunch of little Lex puppies that were similar and looked awfully a lot like my dog Lex.
Dr. Klatz, I'd like to add some arrows to your quiver with which to fend off those who think it prudent to place control of any technology in the hands of any government.
I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves.
And if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.
I have heard Dr. Seed on some news programs, CNN specifically, and I was not impressed by Dr. Seed's demeanor.
However, knowing how stressful the media can be, I don't wish to judge him harshly by that.
I think that it's important that if someone is going to get into the cloning business, to clone people, that they really consider the implications very strongly.
And I think that it should be in the hands of many rather than the hands of the few.
There's probably a genetic component, though we don't know that for sure.
I mean, you know, how much is a genetic component?
I will tell you this, there is a huge body of knowledge that is being developed right now on how to optimize immunity.
And immunity can be optimized in many ways through nutrition, through drug therapies, through meditation, through alterations in lifestyle.
And I would urge you to explore those various different methods, not just through your local medical society, through conventional medicine, but maybe even through some of the alternative medical practitioners that are out there, because there's an awful lot that's known about immunity in folk medicine that is still the cutting edge and the basis of laboratory research for conventional medicine.
And initially, early in the outbreak of AIDS, I thought Dr. Duisberg might have an interesting point.
However, now that so much has been done on AIDS and so much is there in the way of drug therapies, if the HIV virus is not the cause of organism, then what the heck are we treating?
I certainly believe that there is a lot more to the immune system than we know about in that it is an individual's immunity that protects them from everything, including the AIDS virus.
But I think that these years and years of research have taken a lot of wind out of his sails with the argument that the HIV is an incidental organism.
Incredible amounts of information about how the immune system works.
That is the only bright light I can see behind AIDS.
As a matter of fact, I credit the AIDS epidemic with the slow onset or the slow development of anti-aging, because prior to the AIDS epidemic, anti-aging medicine was ready to explode into the public consciousness, into the scientific consciousness as a ripe area for research.
AIDS came along and really siphoned off a lot of the research funds for new areas of endeavor, which anti-aging medicine was really, I think, one of the primary focuses of new research.
Yes, what you would do is, I mean, this is certainly, you know, it's speculation whether this will work with humans, though, if it works with rhinoceroses and pandas and frogs and guinea pigs, you know, you would have a hard time believing that it would not work with humans.
But what you would do is the egg is essentially sterilized.
And the DNA, the genetic material within the egg is removed, and then whatever you put in its place is the DNA that will grow into the fetus.
And so you would put, you know, chromosomes from the sperm and chromosomes from the female.
When I say guinea pigs, I'm saying that people who are involved in anti-aging medicine are their own guinea pigs.
I mean, this is in many ways this is cutting-edge technology, and you serve as your own control with these nutritional therapies and some of the drug therapies, some of the hormone therapies.
And so it's a field that is where the doctors themselves are volunteers for their own research.
Not that the research is dangerous, but this is new stuff.