Aug. 1, 2004 - Art Bell
02:51:53
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| And the great American Southwest. | ||
| I vid you all, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world 25 times on every single one of you covered like a blanket. | ||
| This program hosts the damn on my bell. | ||
| And this is going to be a fascinating night all the way around. | ||
| In the next hour, Dr. Platz may tell you how to live forever. | ||
| It's a real deal, folks, not some hokey pokey something is ahead of the main effort to make human lives longer in America. | ||
| Dr. Platz. | ||
| Now, I'm going to give you all kinds of reasons right here at the beginning of the program to go to our website, coast2coastam.com. | ||
| And the first reason would be my webcam shop taken just a few hours ago. | ||
| As the moisture moves up from Mexico, the desert becomes invaded with thunderstorms and all kinds of strange things. | ||
| And I took this picture, I don't know, a few hours ago. | ||
| And so there it is taken in my backyard. | ||
| That's what I lovingly call my backyard. | ||
| It's on the Art Bell webcam up there. | ||
| That's but one reason. | ||
| Another reason is I want you to see the Art Bell Burn in Hell video. | ||
| This is produced by some people. | ||
| As you know, there's a group of people out there who think that President Bush and his administration are the ones who killed the Americans in New York and plowed the airplanes into the building through some giant conspiracy. | ||
| They think President Bush and company did that to America. | ||
| And they just cannot believe that I don't go along with them. | ||
| So this group of what I call wingnuts has produced the R Bell Burning Hell video. | ||
| And I hope you get to see it before their website collapses and itself goes down to meet the Horned One. | ||
| Now, in a moment, what a treat I've got for you. | ||
| Bonnie Crystal. | ||
| Friend of mine, fellow ham operator. | ||
| Bonnie Crystal is a cave explorer and technologist. | ||
| She travels to remote areas of the globe in search of unknown portals into the underground world. | ||
| Bonnie is in the forefront of a new generation of wilderness explorers, as comfortable with satellite communications as she is with trekking through dense jungle, climbing the sheer face of a cliver, descending down a thousand-foot rope into the darkness of some sort of unknown abyss. | ||
| On a two-month-long expedition in the land of the ancient cloud people of Peru in a distant mountain range near the Amazon jungle, Bonnie has just discovered an area filled with thousands of caves, very, very deep caves. | ||
| Very deep. | ||
| Bonnie is on a quest to explore these vast, undiscovered chasms inside the earth, to seek out a strange world of mysterious life, to go boldly where no human has gone before, and come back alive. | ||
| When she's not underground, Ms. Crystal is also a best-selling author, a successful electronic inventor, and a businesswoman at home in Silicon Valley, California. | ||
| A friend of mine, in a moment, from Lima, Peru, she's on a break, then she goes back out into the bush for another month. | ||
| In a moment, Bonnie Crystal. | ||
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We'll be right back. | |
| Bonnie Crystal has been a friend of mine now for years. | ||
| And, you know, she's much like me in a lot of ways. | ||
| I mean, we both love electronics and antennas, and she's designed a lot of antennas, and she just knows a whole lot about electronics. | ||
| However, she has this other thing she does every now and then. | ||
| And I think she's out of her mind. | ||
| But she does it anyway. | ||
| She goes way deep into the earth. | ||
| Here from Lima, Peru, I hope, is Bonnie. | ||
| Bonnie? | ||
| Hi, Art. | ||
| Ha ha, you are there. | ||
| Okay, wonderful. | ||
| It's great to have you, Bonnie. | ||
| And you have been in Peru now for how long? | ||
| Well, I've been here for about six weeks now on an expedition to explore the caves of Peru. | ||
| Okay, back off a little bit from your telephone. | ||
| You're popping zappies. | ||
| So you can back off a little bit. | ||
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There you go. | |
| That's good. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So actually, at the moment, you're in Peru on a break at, what, a hotel? | ||
| Yeah, I'm sitting in a little hotel. | ||
| It's like something out of a Humphrey Bogart movie. | ||
| And it's called Pension Yolana. | ||
| And it's a little place on the Pacific coast of Peru here in Lima. | ||
| We just got back from the jungle and from the high Andes way up there in northern Peru. | ||
| We're loading up with supplies and a fresh crew of more cave explorers here to go out for the second phase of the expedition into the cloud people. | ||
| Okay, we should tell the audience at this point that here's another reason to go to the website. | ||
| We have tons of photographs that Bonnie sent up just before this interview, and we have them on the website. | ||
| Thank you so much, Bonnie, for taking the time and trouble at the hotel in Peru on break to send the photographs up. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, I was glad to be able to get them up on your site. | ||
| I don't think my website can handle the traffic like yours can. | ||
| None of them do. | ||
| Anyway, listen, Bonnie, you know, I know you seek out the deepest caves in the world. | ||
| Like a mountain climber has been asked so many times, why? | ||
| Why do you do this? | ||
| Why do you go I'm curious, everybody's curious about what's in our earth, but I'm not so curious that I would go down into a cave five feet, much less 1,000 or 1,500, not a chance. | ||
| Why do you do this? | ||
| Well, for me, it's one of those things that as a child, I always wanted to go out and do things that mommy wouldn't let me do. | ||
| Don't go in that cave, Bonnie. | ||
| But on the other hand, it's more than that. | ||
| It's really that I grew up with the saying, you go out there and go where no one's gone before and to make the first steps into a world where no human has seen before or at least not seen alive after they did it, | ||
| I think that's fascinating for me and it makes me feel like I'm more alive to experience it. | ||
| Well, that's a good analogy. | ||
| I mean, we know less about what is below our feet than we do what's in space. | ||
| We really haven't explored a great deal below our Earth. | ||
| Now, why Peru? | ||
| How high do you go in the Andes to get to these incredible caves? | ||
| Well, our base camp for the last phase of the expedition was at 14,000 feet elevation. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| 14,000 feet? | ||
| That's Huffin and Puffin country. | ||
| I mean, in an aircraft above 13,000, you've got to wear, you know, something giving you oxygen. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Well, you get acclimatized after a little while. | ||
| I live at sea level, so it took me about three or four days to get acclimatized. | ||
| But still, working at that altitude is still difficult. | ||
| And climbing up and down thousand-foot ropes is even more difficult. | ||
| You have to stay in shape to do this kind of thing. | ||
| And it's one of those things that not a whole lot of people do in the world. | ||
| And I think that's part of the intrigue of it is to get out there. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why these caves have not been previously explored is because it's just so difficult to get to them. | ||
| How about the fear of death, Bonnie? | ||
| The fear of death. | ||
| That would enter into it for me. | ||
| I mean, when you're crawling through something horizontally that's 1,000 feet below the ground and it's like something you can barely get through, don't you ever worry about the ground shifting way down there? | ||
| And, you know, I think that it's prone to earthquakes, isn't it? | ||
| Well, a lot of the earthquakes that have happened in the geologic past over the millions of years that these caves have been there have made the caves, whatever was going to happen to the cave has already happened to them by earthquakes that are much larger probably than what we'll experience here. | ||
| Geologic movement of the earth and that sort of thing. | ||
| So they actually tend to be fairly stable at this point in geologic time. | ||
| And one of the things that we watch out for is movement of rock adjacent to where we're walking through the passage. | ||
| And rocks anywhere from the size of a basketball up to maybe the size of a car I've seen move in caves. | ||
| So you've got to watch out for that sort of thing. | ||
| But otherwise, it's pretty safe once you are careful of not bumping against any rocks that will shift. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You have made a potential, very serious discovery already, haven't you? | ||
| And I'm talking now about the writing on the cave walls that you found. | ||
| Yes, I just discovered a cave area that has a bunch of cave writing and pictographs and pictures on the cave walls. | ||
| It's not an area that was previously known to have this. | ||
| Some of the writing appears to be... | ||
| And some of this looks amazingly similar to that type of writing. | ||
| Like kanji? | ||
| Yes, like kanji, right. | ||
| So I haven't had it deciphered yet by an archaeologist or by anyone who knows this yet, but it's just a recent discovery. | ||
| It just came back from the remote jungle area. | ||
| And I'm going to be showing it to an archaeologist in three days from now. | ||
| How far into a cave did you find this? | ||
| This was very near the entrance to the cave. | ||
| And it was actually all around the entrance. | ||
| And one of the particular pictographs was as if some shepherd was counting the number of llamas that they had in their flock one year. | ||
| And then there was another picture of the same flock with more babies in the flock. | ||
| That's pretty incredible. | ||
| Is there any way to estimate how old this might be or even guess? | ||
| Yes, one of the ways that we do it is over a period of time, the limestone that forms the cave walls tends to dissolve somewhat by water flowing on it. | ||
| And that can form a coating over the painting itself on the cave walls and preserve it. | ||
| But you can measure the depth of the actual rock covering, the solution of rock that has formed over the painting, and somewhat get a date for this. | ||
| There's carbon dating as well and a couple of other different forms of dating. | ||
| Well, the implication then would be that long, long ago, you tell me maybe how long ago, they made it from Asia to South America. | ||
| That's the implication, right? | ||
| That's one of the implications there. | ||
| And there is a lot of different theories on the movement of ancient civilizations. | ||
| Now, we know for sure through carbon dating that here in Peru there is a city that was recently uncovered that is 5,000 years old, and it has pyramids. | ||
| I just visited that, and it's really amazing to see that. | ||
| One of the great things about it is that this particular city lived for at least 500 years totally in peace without having armies in battles with anybody else. | ||
| And, you know, it's really remarkable that at that point in history, there was a great civilization here in Peru, contemporary with the pyramids being built over there in Egypt. | ||
| Yes, isn't that odd? | ||
| Pyramids in Peru and pyramids in Egypt, and apparently appearing on the earth are constructed at about the same time. | ||
| Any thoughts on how that could be? | ||
| Well, it seems like they had the same idea at the same time, and I'm not sure exactly how it was possible for them to come up with these same ideas without other than telepathy or synchronicity or something like that. | ||
| Some kind of communication of some sort. | ||
| But there obviously was no radio then. | ||
| There was no anything. | ||
| In fact, we didn't even imagine that you could go from one of these places to another place. | ||
| So what accounts for that? | ||
| Telepathy? | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| A lot of inventions happen around the same time and through some magical means or telepathy or some zeitgeist, some people have called it. | ||
| What about the possibility of intervention? | ||
| Certainly that's a possibility. | ||
| One of the interesting things I found, I was just up at Machu Picchu Ruins, the famous Machu Picchu. | ||
| And I thought, well, I'll take a look under Machu Picchu. | ||
| And so I started looking around the base of it, and I found a cave under Machu Picchu. | ||
| And right near the entrance to the cave was a rock carving, very vivid rock carving that someone had made next to the entrance to the cave. | ||
| And it looked remarkably like one of those gray alien heads. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I took a picture of it, and it will be up on my website here probably tonight sometime. | ||
| And it looks like a gray alien. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| See for yourself if that's what you're doing. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Boy, I wish I had that photograph. | ||
| This is in a cave that you found under Archu Piju. | ||
| Do you think this has not been seen before? | ||
| I think it's been seen, but I don't know how much it's been studied or even photographed. | ||
| So I figured, well, I'd take a picture of it and put it up on the website. | ||
| And I think Jessica's trying to get it up there on my website right now at expeditioncave.com. | ||
| Say it again, please? | ||
| ExpeditionCave.com. | ||
| Expeditioncave.com. | ||
| All right. | ||
| A lot of people are going to be up there looking for that. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| And, you know, that's at least as viable an explanation, intervention is what I'm talking about, as is some sort of telepathy. | ||
| I'm willing to bite on one as easily as the other. | ||
| How about you? | ||
| Yeah, it's a total mystery for me. | ||
| I don't particularly have any evidence either way on this. | ||
| And neither does anyone else as far as I can tell. | ||
| With 5,000 years of history here in Peru, of people living around the caves and performing ceremonies in the caves and having cave writing and art and as well as a lot of tombs in some of the caves here. | ||
| They're finding artifacts and that sort of thing from back then. | ||
| I think there was quite a bit of civilization happening at that point. | ||
| And maybe there is some link between the old world and the new world here. | ||
| Maybe the new world is not so new as they once thought it was. | ||
| You told me you found a cavern so deep that the only thing at the bottom of it were bones, human and animal, etc. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| In fact, not just one, but many of these caverns. | ||
| One of the things in the particular area where I just was up in the Andes, you get these very deep canyons and high mountains with sharp cliffs and that sort of thing. | ||
| And on one of the slopes of one of these cliffs, right at the bottom of the slope, was a very deep pit that went straight down. | ||
| And so we went down that with a rope. | ||
| And down at the bottom, we found this big mound of bones and prehistoric animals and extinct animal bones as well as there's human bones and that sort of thing there. | ||
| Human bones. | ||
| I'm happy to hear you didn't add yours to the pile. | ||
| These are obviously people who, what? | ||
| People and animals who just were unaware and stepped into the pit. | ||
| That was the final step of their lives? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And it was a long step for them because it would take them about 10 seconds to reach the bottom. | ||
| They'd have a little while to think about it, you know, the last unfortunate step that they made, I guess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, as you're hanging on a rope that's going down vertically into the unknown, what are you thinking about? | ||
| Well, I'm hoping that the rope doesn't braid against the rock up there near the top and break. | ||
| That would be on my mind. | ||
| But other than that, I'm thinking, well, what is this like down there in the bottom of, you know, when I reach the bottom, what am I going to find? | ||
| I'm looking into the dark and my headlamp can only go so far, and I'm sliding down this rope, and it may take me 15 or 20 minutes to get to the bottom of the rope, going pretty fast. | ||
| And you mean no matter how you shine your light in the down direction, you don't see it hitting anything at all? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, even though I've got a powerful headlamp, a couple of headlamps on it. | ||
| All right, listen, we're here at the bottom of the hour, so hold on, Bonnie. | ||
| She's at a Humphrey Bogart kind of atmospheric hotel there in Lima, Peru. | ||
| And she's about to head back out toward the cloud people and the deepest caverns in the entire hemisphere. | ||
| Going down into holes that just keep going and keep going and keep going. | ||
| And your light can't see the bottom. | ||
| From the high desert, in the middle of the night, this is Coast to Coast AM. | ||
|
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I'm Art Bell. | |
| To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295. | ||
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| From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. | ||
| Indeed, so. | ||
| My guest is a good friend of mine, Bonnie Crystal. | ||
| She's a spelunker presently in Peru, in Lima, Peru. | ||
| She goes down into the earth, really far down into the earth, as far perhaps as a human can go in discovered caves. | ||
| That's what she does. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| Well, I guess she just sort of told me. | ||
| It's not something I would do, but it sure is something I love hearing about. | ||
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We'll be right back. | |
| Well, as I mentioned, Bonnie's also a ham operator, a very devoted one, and she's a backpacker, figures, right? | ||
| That is someone who carries a radio on their back in a backpack and communicates on shortwave. | ||
| And that's what she's taken down there with her. | ||
| And believe it or not, she apparently heard me on the 75-meter band from way out in the middle of nowhere in Peru and then on 18 meters, I guess. | ||
| Is that right, Bonnie? | ||
| Yeah, I heard your signal loud and clear from our base camp there up in the highlands. | ||
| It was coming through great. | ||
| Yeah, it's great to hear. | ||
| Music to my ears. | ||
| And we're going to try and communicate as you go back out. | ||
| Now, you're headed back out to go where? | ||
| Another month out there. | ||
| Where? | ||
| Well, we're headed a little further north than we were before. | ||
| We're going to be up in the Chochapoyan area. | ||
| The Chochapoyans were pre-Inca civilization, and they still exist, the people, as a culture. | ||
| And not a whole lot was known about them until recently. | ||
| But they lived in this area where I found thousands of caves. | ||
| And we're going to be up around 9,000 to 13,000 feet per next camp and possibly as high as 14,000 feet looking at the caves up there. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You know, the first picture that everybody is going to be greeted by on the website shows recently, Discovery, high-definition Discovery that I'm blessed to have has been showing a series, Bonnie, on some what are called sinkholes in, I think, Brazil, actually, but in South America. | ||
| These things are monstrous, and they look kind of like what you're standing in front of right here on this first photograph that everybody's going to see. | ||
| It says Bonnie Kristol discovering a deep cave entrance in Peru. | ||
| But it almost looks like, this part of it almost looks like the sinkholes That they've been talking about on Discovery, and they were inevitably, as I suppose perhaps were caves, were formed by water, some sort of subterranean water that caused these incredible sinkholes. | ||
| And on Discovery, they're finding that at the bottom of these sinkholes, there's an entirely different biology. | ||
| I mean, there's different plants, there's different, because they're so far down. | ||
| So I'm sure in caves, you run into the same thing, don't you? | ||
| Plants that don't exist above the surface, not to mention the possibility of life? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| You get down in these caves, and it's like a time machine. | ||
| It's like walking into the past. | ||
| They seem to preserve anything that is in them that gets preserved differently from what's on the surface, because especially if you have these very large cave entrances that go down very deep, you can have plants, animals living down in there. | ||
| Well, Bonnie, how do plants or animals, no, plants especially, we're talking about a place where there is never, ever any light? | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| Well, in the actual areas where there's zero light, there's very little bit of plant activity, although we do find some bacteria that is unique, and we find some other types of kinds of plants that don't require sunlight. | ||
| But in some of these big pits, the entrances of them are so huge, you know, we're talking hundreds of feet across, like the sinkholes in Brazil. | ||
| And there's enough light that reaches down into the bottom of these things hundreds of feet down that some plants can grow. | ||
| And in fact, it's almost like a sampling of the plants that used to grow on the surface thousands of years ago. | ||
| Have you ever wondered, Bonnie, whether you're going to wander into a lost world? | ||
| I mean, really a lost world where everything is so far down and deep and different that you're dealing with, you know, the land time forgot. | ||
| I don't know how to put it, but something very different. | ||
| Yeah, and in fact, some of the experiences that I've had have been parallel to, like the land that time forgot, running into different species that have been thought to be non-existent at this point, or new kinds of species of plants and animals that we haven't seen before, and have discovered several different types of them. | ||
| And one of the great things about it is that you never know what you're going to find down there. | ||
| And that's one of the things that keeps me going and keeps me wanting to go out in the wilderness and find these kind of caves is you just don't know what's going to be down there. | ||
| Yeah, I guess not. | ||
| And in terms of life, are you at all surprised by what you find or don't find in caves? | ||
| What kind of life lives there, if any? | ||
| Well, I've found everything from snakes and fish and frogs and birds and bats to microbes and strange-looking orange plants and as well as all the different kinds of minerals that form and look like plants or animals in some sort of strange way. | ||
| A lot of people see different figurines and stuff in the various mineralization formations. | ||
| I've walked into passages where it is like being inside a geode or a vast room full of diamonds, you know, the way the crystalline features are on the walls, and it's like being inside a fabulous array of jewels or something. | ||
| Yeah, one of your photographs shows something like that, all white. | ||
| What is that white stuff? | ||
| Yeah, that white stuff is gypsum crystals, and they're perfectly clear, although they show up white in the photographs. | ||
| When you walk in, it's like being in a chandelier shop or something. | ||
| So in other words, the only reason they look white is because of the flash of the camera. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| They're clear. | ||
| Wow, that's really trippy. | ||
| That's really trippy. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And it's like, you know, when the water comes through some of these passages and just makes everything glisten, it's really fantastic. | ||
| It's like it is another world. | ||
| Is that like it on the surface? | ||
| Bonnie, is that what formed those caves? | ||
| Is it water? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Eons ago, the cracks in the limestone on the Earth's upper crust and that sort of thing got entered by water. | ||
| And the water continued to widen the cracks in the earth by erosion. | ||
| And then the ground was uplifted from geologic forces and tectonic movement and earthquakes and upward thrusts of earth movement. | ||
| And this caused the caves to get higher up into the Andes here. | ||
| So now you have these caves that used to be, well, the limestone itself used to be on the sea floor. | ||
| And then it got uplifted to 14,000 feet. | ||
| So you can imagine the kind of tectonic and geologic forces that must have been at play. | ||
| I can imagine, I also know that you're in the rainforest area. | ||
| So here's something I wonder about, and I wonder if you guys in caves wonder about it. | ||
| But I mean, if you were to hear a sudden rushing sound as lots of water coming your way, when you're down in a cave crawling horizontally somewhere, you know, in the back of your mind, you've got to think, oh my God, did something let go somewhere? | ||
| I mean, is there that danger of something letting go somewhere or a giant storm happening and water finding it's filling the cave that you're in? | ||
| Yes, that is a big risk when exploring caves. | ||
| If you have a flash flood into the cave from water coming in through the various pathways, that it can fill up the cave and cause you to be trapped. | ||
| And just recently there was a group of British cavers who were trapped in a Mexican cave by rising water. | ||
| And one of my friends had that very same thing that you just described. | ||
| The sound of rushing water in the passage, it just makes us cringe. | ||
| And we start heading for a high spot in the cave right away, you know, running as fast as we can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is perhaps one of your longest trips, isn't it? | ||
| I mean, I know you've been down there a month already, and you've got another month ahead of you. | ||
| That's a long, long exploration, isn't it? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| Well, it takes a long time to get to these areas. | ||
| We go by mule pack and by walking and riding horses and over land and through the jungle and up into these mountains. | ||
| And it's slow going. | ||
| So once you get there, you want to be able to spend some time. | ||
| And I've got a wonderful group of explorers with me from California and Colorado and Oregon, a group that I've been caving with and exploring for a very long time here. | ||
| And it's just wonderful. | ||
| We depend upon each other for our lives when we're down there. | ||
| So you get to know your friends. | ||
| You get to know who your friends are real good when you do this. | ||
| Yes, I'm sure. | ||
| We have several clips of you hanging on the end of a rope above absolutely nothing at all. | ||
| And I just can't even fathom that feeling. | ||
| I just can't fathom it. | ||
| And then not knowing what you're going to find and if you do get to the bottom, are there any so deep that you can't reach them with the equipment you brought? | ||
| Occasionally that happens. | ||
| When we got to this one cave, we anchored the rope up above and went down a 600-foot rope. | ||
| And that wasn't enough. | ||
| You're hanging free on the rope in the middle of the darkness, 600 feet down, and you still can't see the bottom. | ||
| And you have to climb the rope back up 600 feet, go get another rope, and tie that on the bottom of that 600-foot rope. | ||
| And you keep going down the second rope, and then you look down, and you're still 20 or 30 feet off the floor of the cave. | ||
| It's one of those kind of things where it's frustrating and intriguing at the same time. | ||
| I would think that once you've been down and then up 600 foot rope, and to get more rope, you're saying, let's pick this up tomorrow or something. | ||
| Well, generally, a thousand foot of rope takes me about a little over two hours to climb. | ||
| So during that time, and especially at this altitude, it takes a lot of work. | ||
| And I've been training for this particular expedition. | ||
| I trained for six months, solid rock climbing and working at the gym and that sort of thing. | ||
| So it's the sort of thing where speleology, which is the science of caves and knowing what is in caves, is really one of those sciences that is considered kind of a dirty science and one that there's not a whole lot of people involved in because it just takes so much effort and you have to be in good shape in order to practice it. | ||
| And I think I'm going to ask a question that I want to know, and I know a lot of people will ask too. | ||
| As you go into the earth, does it get warmer or does it get cooler? | ||
| A lot of action going on in the background there. | ||
| Does it get warmer or cooler, Bonnie? | ||
| What are the temperatures like underground? | ||
| Well, a lot of the caves seem to exchange their air with the outside once or twice a day, so there is still good air in the caves when you go down further down. | ||
| So we don't have to worry most of the time about breathing apparatus or that sort of thing. | ||
| But is there any general rule as you descend into the earth about whether it gets warmer or cooler, or does it just depend? | ||
| Most of the caves are about the medium temperature of the night and daytime of the surface area where they are situated. | ||
| So let's say you have a desert cave. | ||
| It's going to be warmer in that cave. | ||
| But if you get very, very deep, it starts to get a little hotter. | ||
| And some of the deep mines for gold and that sort of thing in South Africa tend to get very, very hot because they're getting down there closer to the magma. | ||
| I've been in some caves. | ||
| One of the caves I was in in Hawaii was a steam vent cave, and it erupted sort of like Old Faithful every 40 minutes. | ||
| So we could only go about 15 minutes into the cave between burps of steam in order to explore the cave. | ||
| And we had to get back out before the next burst of steam. | ||
| Isn't that like being in a car and trying to get just across the tracks before the train comes? | ||
| A little? | ||
| I mean, what happens to you if you don't get back out in time? | ||
| Well, you probably would die at that point because you'd be asphyxiated if you didn't have breathing apparatus or something, you know. | ||
| You know, after all of this and hearing all of this, it really does come back to why in the world somebody would do all this. | ||
| I guess you've explained it, but not in a way that would cause me to begin to lower myself on any rope into any giant hole in the ground. | ||
| Do you think this might be your last great expedition, or do you think there are more ahead of you? | ||
| Well, I like to think that there's much more ahead. | ||
| In fact, this recent find of thousands of caves in this particular area has sort of given me a new goal, you know, here. | ||
| We've only been able to explore about 100 of them so far, and we don't know where the other 900 of them lead, you know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, you know, there's probably more than I could do in my lifetime here. | ||
| Do you think there is any possibility, Bonnie, that there is a cave somewhere that virtually doesn't have a bottom or an end to it? | ||
| Well, a cave that literally might lead down way into the earth. | ||
| Is there that possibility, Bonnie? | ||
| There certainly is, and I'm out there trying to find it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if you found a cave of that sort, I mean, that's like journey to the center of the earth or something. | ||
| Would you just keep going? | ||
| Or what do you do? | ||
| Yeah, we would keep going and we would set up and camp inside it and stay in there until we kept finding more and more passage and just continue on like that and probably get more cave explorers involved in it. | ||
| There are s uh some caves right now that we have not found the ends of. | ||
| And you know, under the New Mexico desert we have a cave now where we have never found the end of it. | ||
| It just keeps going. | ||
| Really? | ||
| We don't really know where it will end. | ||
| I guess that's the whole reason because we don't know where it's going to end. | ||
| Well, you're a special breed. | ||
| That's all I can say. | ||
| A very special breed of person that would go to places where you don't know where it's going to end and it goes down. | ||
| So again, it's been a pleasure interviewing you. | ||
| I will continue to try and make some shortwave schedules with you and I know you're going to get a pretty good setup where you're headed, right? | ||
| Yeah, in this new location on a mountaintop, I hope to be able to talk to you directly pretty good on the ham radio. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, we'll stay in touch. | ||
| And all I can say is on behalf of the audience listening and everybody out there, be safe, Bonnie. | ||
| Thanks, Art. | ||
| Good night, and take care. | ||
| You're back out. | ||
| You actually leave for the field again in how long from now? | ||
| About 36 hours from now, I leave and head up into the jungle and then up into the mountains from there. | ||
| Good luck, my friend. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Bonnie Crystal, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| She does something that I surely would not, not in a million years. | ||
| But hearing about it and then being able to see it here on the website sort of lets you be along. | ||
| From Lima, Peru. | ||
| That was Bonnie Crystal. | ||
|
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I'm Art Bell. | |
| Some velvet morning when I was break. | ||
| I'm gonna open up your gate And maybe tell you about Phaedra And how she gave me life And how she made it in Some velvet morning when | ||
| I'm straight Flowers growing on a hill Driving flies and dive for this Learn from us very much Look at us but | ||
| do not touch Phaedra is my name Thank you. | ||
| To talk with ArcVelle, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295. | ||
| The first-time caller line is Area Code 775-727-1222. | ||
| To talk with Art Bell from East of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033. | ||
| From West to the Rockies, call ARC at 800-618-8255. | ||
| International callers may reach ArtVell by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903. | ||
| From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. | ||
| From deep below the ground, we'll move up to the top of the ground and what's going on in our world. | ||
| What an hour that was, though, huh? | ||
| The photographs from all of that are up on the website, coasttocoastam.com. | ||
|
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And you definitely don't want to miss the Art Bell Burn in Hell video. | |
| You joined us late. | ||
| Some wingnuts who are angry with me because I refuse to believe that President Bush blew up the buildings in New York and crashed into the Pentagon and did all of that because I won't join them in that belief. | ||
| They have made this video called Art Bell Burn in Hell or Burn in Hell video. | ||
| The Art Bell Burn in Hell video. | ||
| And I liked it. | ||
| I somehow liked it. | ||
| It's a badge of my refusal to cave in to such Looney Tunes ideas. | ||
| And it's funny. | ||
| And somebody took a lot of time out of their life to do it. | ||
| So, unflattering, though it may be, I thought you would enjoy it. | ||
| Burn in hell, huh? | ||
| All right, back to Earth. | ||
| In a moment, Dr. Ronald Klatz. | ||
| Now, you may have recently seen, you know, we lost our president Reagan to Alzheimer's. | ||
| Probably a horrible way to die, you know, just to have your brain go. | ||
| And there is research right now called stem cell research, and his son, Ron Reagan, made an impassioned plea at the Democrats Convention for stem cell research. | ||
| And I guess a lot of people really don't know what stem cell research really is or don't properly understand it. | ||
| In fact, I suppose I'm in that class, too. | ||
| So, you know, there's a giant controversy about this. | ||
| If we could perhaps figure it out, we could perhaps save the lives of people like President Reagan and a lot of other people. | ||
| That would all come potentially and maybe, maybe, from stem cell research. | ||
| I think that Dr. Klatz imagines it definitely will. | ||
| Some are not so sure as some think that it's the taking of life, it's murder. | ||
| That's what we're going to talk about. | ||
| I want to understand it myself. | ||
| Dr. Ronald Klatz is recognized as a leading authority in the new clinical science of anti-aging medicine. | ||
| For over a decade, he's been integral in pioneering exploration of new therapies for the treatment and prevention of age-related degenerative diseases. | ||
| He is the physician, founder, and president of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine Inc. | ||
| Dr. Klatz is highly regarded by scientific and academic colleagues for his continuing medical education lectures on the demographics of aging, the impact of biomedical technologies on longevity. | ||
| He's a consultant in the biotechnology industry, a respected advisor to several members of the U.S. Congress and others on Capitol Hill. | ||
| He's a heavyweight, no question. | ||
| Dr. Klatz devotes much of his time to research and to the development of advanced biosciences for the benefit of humanity. | ||
| Tonight, he's going to talk about stem cells. | ||
| Stay right there. | ||
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Stay right there. | |
| Incidentally, if you have reason to communicate with me, I am Art Bell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L, all lowercase at mindspring.com or A-O-L.com. | ||
| Both will get the job done now. | ||
| Dr. Klatz, as I said, is the position founder and president of the American Academy of Anti-Aging. | ||
| So he's right up on the very cutting edge of what can be done to keep you alive longer. | ||
| Dr. Klatz, welcome back to the program. | ||
| Good morning, Art. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's great to be on your show. | ||
| Good to have you. | ||
| Before we launch into stem cells, which we're about to do, I would like to get the latest bottom line on keeping people alive longer. | ||
| Where are we? | ||
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Where are we? | |
| Well, there's never been a better time to be alive than today. | ||
| There are incredible technologies. | ||
| There's a pipeline full of incredible technologies that are waiting to give birth at every moment. | ||
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There are, I don't know how to say it. | |
| It's pretty exciting stuff, actually. | ||
| Were it not for the craziness in the world with focus on war and politics and those sort of things, and if there was a little bit more money to go around, or at least a better atmosphere for biotechnology, many of these things would already be on the market right now. | ||
| They're still in the laboratory, but nanotechnology is coming on StrongNanotechnology, which was science fiction 15 years ago, 10 years ago. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Is already yielding commercial products right now in materials and microelectronics. | ||
| But very shortly, there will be incredible breakthroughs with regard to laboratory on chip technology. | ||
| As a matter of fact, it's already happening. | ||
| You can already buy it for the laboratory right now for biological research. | ||
| But soon, a doctor will be able to take a drop of your blood, literally take a drop of your blood, put it on something the size of a postage stamp, put it in a little electronic oven, and five minutes later, 10 minutes later, 30 minutes later, it'll print out a report the size of a phone book, | ||
| if you like, on all your specific genetic sequences, tell you what diseases you have, what diseases you may have sometime in the future, what diseases you could have sometime in the future, and what diseases you'll never have. | ||
| I don't know if that's good or bad. | ||
| I mean, we're at the stage now where, as you just put it, we can find out pretty much what's liable to happen to you. | ||
| Oh, yeah, our future. | ||
| But we can't do anything about it yet, or can we? | ||
| Well, yeah, there's a lot we can do about it. | ||
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You see, forewarned is forearmed. | |
| It's sort of like knowing that you're at risk. | ||
| There are certain people who are at risk, majorly at risk for heart disease. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And those are people who Should be taking all the precautions in the world with regard to cholesterol-lowering agents and exercise and diet and everything else. | ||
| There are other people who, no matter what they do, they're never going to end up with a heart attack. | ||
| And those people, they don't have to waste their money, their time, their energies. | ||
| So if your doctor could know, instead of just tossing a coin and hoping that it ends the right way, it ends up on the right side, if the doctor could know that you're going to be at a 70, 80, 90 percent risk of a heart attack in the next 10 years, well, he can focus on you and the other five patients who may look just like you, same color eyes, same weight, the same cholesterol, same blood pressure, but they're never going to have heart disease. | ||
| He doesn't have to waste his time, his energy, and your dollars worrying about their heart conditions. | ||
| He can worry about other things. | ||
| So early detection is an incredible opportunity. | ||
| You asked about what's new. | ||
| I just had a PET scan, a positron emission tomography scan. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| For the listeners who don't know what that is, that's a latest nuclear medicine. | ||
| They took a little bit of a radioactive isotope, injected into my arm, and I laid down on a table, and it took about 20 minutes. | ||
| I went through this scanner, something like a big donut hole, runs your body through like an MRI or a CT scanner. | ||
| And it made a three-dimensional image of my whole body from this nuclear material, this radioactive isotope that was in my veins. | ||
| And the nice thing about PET scan technology is it can detect to 97% accuracy right now whether you have a tumor growing in you. | ||
| You see, now I beat heart disease a few years ago. | ||
| My dad had his first heart attack at age 47, 48. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, and I have pretty much the same genetics as he does. | ||
| I have a problem with cholesterol. | ||
| I have a couple extra pounds on me. | ||
| So how did you feel about your PET scan? | ||
| Was it, did you smile and say, boy, look at me? | ||
| Or did you go, what the hell's that? | ||
| No, I just laid there and relaxed, and it was no big deal. | ||
| And 20 minutes later, I came out. | ||
| I looked on the screen, and I saw this three-dimensional image of all these little dots and little flickers on the screen. | ||
| And I said, wow, no big Christmas tree lights. | ||
| Good news. | ||
| No cancer. | ||
| So I don't have cancer, and that's one less thing I have to worry about right now. | ||
| And I'll do it again in another two years or three years. | ||
| But I'm not going to be as concerned about taking cancer preventive therapy as I might have been had I not had access to this wonderful test. | ||
| I suppose that's true. | ||
| If we conducted a Manhattan-style project, which is I think what Ron Reagan suggested, into stem cell research or other areas of anti-aging medicine, Dr. Klatz, and you had all the money you could legitimately use in the effort, what could be done? | ||
| Amazing things. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| And it wouldn't be that much money. | ||
| Give me an idea. | ||
| Well, let's see. | ||
| I don't want to be political or anything, but. | ||
| Oh, we're going to get there. | ||
| It's unavoidable. | ||
| Okay, well, when we started this current presidential term, we had, what, a $2.5 trillion surplus in the budget? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And now we have a $2.5, or excuse me, we have, what, a $3 or maybe $4 trillion deficit? | ||
| Upsettingly large, yes. | ||
| I mean, that's a lot of spending in a short period of time. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, wars cost a lot of money here. | ||
| An awful lot of money. | ||
| Well, realize that the entire governmental budget for anti-aging medicine, the entire governmental research budget for anti-aging medicine is only a few tens of millions of dollars a year. | ||
| So imagine what you could do. | ||
| Well, that's what I'm asking you to do for me. | ||
| Yeah, well, okay, let's put it this way. | ||
| Stem cells is happening on its own, and the government has budgeted $200 million for stem cell research, and most of it is not being used for stem cells right now because of the political turmoil around stem cells. | ||
| Doctor, we're about to launch into all of that, but I'm taking budget art. | ||
| Let me be real clear. | ||
| I think that we could have incredible breakthroughs within five years. | ||
| I mean, really palpable improvements in quality of life and probably quantity of life with a budget directed towards anti-aging therapies of $5 billion or less per year. | ||
| And I think it could be as little as $500 million per year over the course of the next five years. | ||
| Increasing lifespan? | ||
| Improving quality of life, absolutely. | ||
| Increasing lifespan, almost certainly. | ||
| What are the possibilities for increasing lifespan? | ||
| Very high. | ||
| You see, well, how can I say it? | ||
| You cannot improve the quality of life without axiomatically increasing the quantity of life. | ||
| There are two sides of the same coin. | ||
| For example, if you don't have a heart attack, you're going to live longer because you're not going to die of that. | ||
| You're going to have to die of something else. | ||
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Right. | |
| So right now, okay, state of the art with anti-aging medicine right now. | ||
| I can take, or any member, any doctor who's practicing anti-aging medicine who's reasonably competent, a member of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, can take the average 65-year-old and in the space of about six months or less, | ||
| with modest interventions, which are some drug therapies, a fair amount of nutritional therapies, a little bit of hormonal therapies, and some exercise, can reduce that person's appearance on paper and biomarkers of aging by five to ten years. | ||
| That means if you test them, you know, like you test an Olympic athlete, you know, everyone understands you too. | ||
| You have an Olympic athlete, you test them with regard to their reaction time, their speed, their strength, their endurance, or blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Well, you can do the same thing with aging. | ||
| And these are called biomarkers of aging. | ||
| And we can test people and say, well, from an aging point of view, you test out and you're 65 years old. | ||
| You have 65 candles on your birthday cake. | ||
| But you test out as a 70-year-old. | ||
| And you also look that much younger? | ||
| People actually do look younger. | ||
| But reversal of five years in an average individual is not unreasonable. | ||
| As a matter of fact, it's quite common. | ||
| Do you imagine the possibility of that's the average individual and some unique individuals, some people who work a little bit harder at it or have some problems to begin with, we can see age regression by as much as 20 years? | ||
| That's quite a bit, all right. | ||
| Do you imagine the possibility, doctor, someday, of the magic bullet, of finding some magic genetic switch that could be thrown that would actually stop aging? | ||
| Is that in the realm of... | ||
| It's a far-forward technology. | ||
| For example, I mean, if we're really, really, really lucky, we might be able to find some combination of nanotechnology and stem cells and DNA repair technology that would actually reset the cells of our body, | ||
| that would eliminate disease cells and aberrant DNA as it's occurring and keep our cells at a constant state of perpetual youth. | ||
| Now that's far-forward technology, but far-forward technology today ain't 500 years. | ||
| It ain't even 50 years. | ||
| It's maybe 30, 35 years. | ||
| Because look how far we've come in the last 35 years. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Is it conceivable? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do I believe that it's probable? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| But it certainly can be conceived of. | ||
| And anything you can conceive of, we're pretty good at achieving as a species, aren't we? | ||
| Well, that is what we're moving toward, though, isn't it? | ||
| Even though we might be taking baby steps, 5, 10, 15, or even 20-year steps right now in another 10, 20, 30 years, how do you think it will come? | ||
| Do you think it will come as a magic bullet kind of deal figured out suddenly by some brilliant mind? | ||
| Or will it be more like elimination of finally so many diseases that there's virtually nothing left that could kill us? | ||
| Well, I think it will be in increments. | ||
| I think that we're already eliminating diseases. | ||
| We're eliminating infectious diseases by and large, with the exception of some nasty things like AIDS and Ebola, maybe West Nile, is pretty well taken for granted, at least in the first world. | ||
| Maybe not in the third world. | ||
| We're making great strides against heart disease and stroke. | ||
| That's not the killer it used to be. | ||
| There are many very excellent therapies against that. | ||
| I mean, hypertension used to be a major killer. | ||
| Now that's really not an issue. | ||
| Very easy to treat hypertension because there's so many good therapies for that. | ||
| So we're wiping out these diseases, these chronic degenerative diseases, one after the other after the other. | ||
| And I think that that's going to be the process. | ||
| And eventually, and maybe not in the too distant future, we're going to have some of these great biotech breakthroughs such as stem cells, which are going to be taking major leaps, baby steps. | ||
| We're about to talk, I'm sure, about stem cells coming right up. | ||
| But on the other side of the coin, doctor, there are also emerging and new diseases and things that would not be your ally as a doctor trying to prolong and preserve the quality of life. | ||
| New diseases that seem to pop up, and a lot of them come out of China. | ||
| I've been wondering about that. | ||
| Why so many come out of China? | ||
| Any thoughts on that? | ||
| Well, I think you told me about the avian flu and the SARS and things like that. | ||
| Things like that, yes. | ||
| Well, China has a dense population, and the population lives very close and in very close proximity with animals. | ||
| They have their farms, their animal farms, very close to their major metropolitan areas. | ||
| And there's a lot of cross-contamination between people and animals. | ||
| Not only do they have animals that are like chickens and cows and pigs and things like that, but they also have a rather diverse palate. | ||
| They have mere cats and we're coming up on a quick break here. | ||
| With these emerging diseases, you still claim as the physician you are that we're winning that battle? | ||
| Yes, I think so. | ||
| Even though there are new diseases that develop every year, the major killers, no new major killers have emerged for the first world. | ||
| The closest thing to it and hold it right there, Dr. Rig. | ||
| We have to go. | ||
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We'll be right back. | |
| To talk with Art Bell. | ||
| Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295. | ||
| The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222. | ||
| To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033. | ||
| From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255. | ||
| International callers may recharge by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free, 800-893-0903. | ||
| From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. | ||
| So, what? | ||
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You want to live forever? | |
| Keep listening. | ||
| You know, I think the way to do this is start with an easy question and then progress to the harder questions. | ||
| So, Dr. Klatz, when does life begin? | ||
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Where do life begin? | |
| Oh, that's an easy question, Aren't sure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It depends on what your particular religious philosophical belief system is. | ||
| For people who are anti-abortion, people who are strongly Judeo-Christian, they may believe that life begins sometime as soon as the sperm and the egg meet, and life begins at that very moment of fertilization. | ||
| Would it be wrong? | ||
| Well, it might be wrong, but one way to say it is as soon as the unique genetic combination has been made, that would be unique, certainly. | ||
| Maybe not life, but there are those who would say that unique combination of genetics is a new life. | ||
| There are those who believe that as well. | ||
| There are other religions that believe that life doesn't begin until sometime later in the process of the gestational period. | ||
| Many Muslims believe that life doesn't begin until about 40 days of gestation. | ||
| There are other people who don't believe that life doesn't begin until birth, until you deliver a viable human being outside the body. | ||
| There are other people who believe that life doesn't begin until about the end of the second trimester, beginning of the third trimester, when the fetus could be viable on its own if it was to be birthed. | ||
| So there's a large spectrum of belief systems as to when human life actually does begin. | ||
| And what's your religion? | ||
| Well, I'm more spiritual than anything else. | ||
| I was born Jewish, and I consider myself Judeo-Christian in my belief system. | ||
| And your belief system suggests what about life? | ||
| I believe that there's I guess I believe that it's a personal choice. | ||
| For myself, I kind of tend to follow the American public. | ||
| I think after the second trimester, you have a hard time arguing that human life is not in existence. | ||
| Once the fetus is well-formed, is human-like, and is able to exist on its own outside the body, then I think you have a very hard argument against this being a viable human life. | ||
| Before that, it may be life, but is it a viable human life? | ||
| That's a question that's up in the air, and I respect everybody's opinion. | ||
| Okay, let's take another one that's up in the air. | ||
| That is stem cells. | ||
| Now, before we even progress into the pluses and minuses, I want to know what the hell a stem cell is. | ||
| What exactly is it? | ||
| In language that we can understand, what is a stem cell? | ||
| A stem cell is a pluripotent cell. | ||
| It's a cell that can become anything that your body needs. | ||
| Your body has over 200 separate cell lines in it. | ||
| That's what makes, those are the building blocks that make you Art Bell. | ||
| 200 separate cells, different cells. | ||
| Well, a stem cell can become any one of those 200. | ||
| It's pluripotent. | ||
| It's a stem from which all other cells are made. | ||
| It's the progenitor cell. | ||
| It's the embryonic cells. | ||
| It's the first cells that are created. | ||
| Is it a cell before, in other words, it's just like a blank cell? | ||
| It's more than a blank cell. | ||
| It has everything in it. | ||
| So it has all the genetic information. | ||
| It could become a bone cell. | ||
| It could become a muscle cell, a heart cell, it could become a brain cell, it could become a piece of your eyeball or your intestine, your hair. | ||
| So then is it a cell prior to an order going out for it to become something? | ||
| Yes, it's the original. | ||
| Okay, let's start with an ovum. | ||
| Okay, let's start with an egg. | ||
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Okay. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Well, the egg is the master cell of reproduction. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Along comes a sperm, which is essentially a delivery vehicle. | ||
| You know, a guided missile, if you will. | ||
| Sperms find their way. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I like that analogy. | ||
| Guided missiles. | ||
| That sounds good. | ||
| It's a guided missile with DNA in it. | ||
| And it's fired right at the egg. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And millions of them go, and only one lucky little sperm finds his way to the right place and gets in there and deposits his DNA. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the DNA from the egg and the DNA from the sperm meet, and then cell reproduction goes to town. | ||
| And then we form a blastocyte after a few days. | ||
| And the blastocyte is a blastocyte is about 150 cells or so. | ||
| That occurs at about age 5. | ||
| And that's where we have the first, really the first stem cells. | ||
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Wait a minute. | |
| You said age 5. | ||
| At day 5. | ||
| Day 5. | ||
| Day 5. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That'll be one of those things. | ||
| And these embryonic stem cells can become nerve, lung, heart, muscle, kidneys, red blood cells, pigmented cells, pancreatic cells, thyroid cells, anything you want. | ||
| There's over 200 different types of cells in the body. | ||
| And in what manner are they ordered to become one thing or another? | ||
| Well, that's the magic of life. | ||
| There are literally thousands and thousands of chemical messengers that are present in the growth process. | ||
| And it's a question of what is next to the cell, what chemical is by the cell, what nutrients are by the cell. | ||
| There's any vast number of stimulants that tell the cell to become or that stimulate one cell to become bone, one cell to become muscle, one cell to become blood. | ||
| There's got to be very little, though, that's random in the process because different as we may be, you get a human each time. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's a miraculous system. | ||
| I don't think that we, well, I know that we don't understand all the mechanisms because we're still trying to puzzle it out so that we can make stem cells work. | ||
| But your question was, what are stem cells? | ||
| Well, they're basically fertilized egg and ovum that had been allowed to grow into a blastocyte, which is the very earliest cellular material that goes on to form the fetus. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So I guess what? | ||
| Our imagination is that we experiment, or the idea is we experiment with stem cells and try and figure out how to order them to do what you want them to do, doctor. | ||
| In other words, build a hand. | ||
| I don't know, whatever. | ||
| I guess what we're doing. | ||
| Well, for example, let's talk about something that we've already done. | ||
| Let's order them to repair heart tissue. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Let's say someone has a heart attack, has a scarred heart. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they had a clogged blood vessel, and they survived the heart attack, but now they have a diseased heart where part of their heart is now flaccid. | ||
| It's not active living muscle anymore. | ||
| It's dead scar tissue. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, and they have... | ||
| They don't even have to be instructed. | ||
| You just inject some of these stem cells into that heart tissue. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And they know exactly where to go and what to do. | ||
| So you're telling me inject the stem cells minus any instruction to them an optional. | ||
| Minus instructions. | ||
| They know what they're doing. | ||
| They find their way to the heart tissue. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And they will find their way to the damaged tissue. | ||
| They will seed the damaged tissue. | ||
| And they will start the repair process. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And this has been done. | ||
| This has been done in humans already. | ||
| It has? | ||
| Yes, it has. | ||
| It's been done in mice. | ||
| It's been done in laboratory animals. | ||
| And recently it's been done in humans. | ||
| And this stuff works. | ||
| This is very, very powerful technology. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now you understand why Ronald Reagan's son is talking about this technology for Alzheimer's, because even though it hasn't been done yet for Alzheimer's, it has been done for stroke. | ||
| And again, the stem cells find their way to the damaged area of the brain. | ||
| They actually regrow new brain tissue. | ||
| They reconnect the nerves. | ||
| And they seem to have the power to repair, perhaps not completely, but certainly to a great extent the damage from the stroke as well. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Oh, this is some of the most earth-shaking technology, mind-blowing technology that you can imagine. | ||
| And it's happening right now. | ||
| And it's just being suppressed. | ||
| It's being suppressed actively and violently by an establishment that there's a religious establishment that's afraid of this because it impacts on the meaning of life issues and potentially the anti-abortion issues, those issues. | ||
| But I also believe that there is an undercurrent of suppression going on from the medical establishment that doesn't know how to deal with this because this will shake up all of health care violently in a very rapid period of time. | ||
| An obvious question, doctor. | ||
| At what point following conception are stem cells most productive for scientists to work with? | ||
| The sooner you are able to retrieve stem cells, the earlier the stage, the more viable and potent the cells are. | ||
| And that's why there is a tremendous desire on the part of scientists to be able to experiment with embryonic stem cells. | ||
| Because there are stem cells. | ||
| You see, there are many types of different stem cells. | ||
| But I mean, we're not talking about one day after conception. | ||
| Are we talking about five? | ||
| In other words, two weeks after conception. | ||
| We're talking about five days after the egg and the ovum meet. | ||
| Are there sufficient numbers of stem cells to be useful after five days? | ||
| You don't need many. | ||
| You see, because you can amplify these cells in the laboratory. | ||
| None of this, you see, this argument about... | ||
| You mean grow? | ||
| You can grow them in a cell culture. | ||
| You can grow these things by the billions in cell cultures. | ||
| You do not need to abort any fetuses in order to make stem cells work. | ||
| This whole argument about abortion is spurious. | ||
| Is it like a crop? | ||
| In other words, once you get it going, can you continue to grow stem cells endlessly? | ||
| Or is there a limit from each new batch or what? | ||
| Well, I'm sure that there's a limit, but for all intents and purposes, these cells will go on indefinitely. | ||
| They're immortal cells. | ||
| They do not age. | ||
| Immortal cells. | ||
| So you can grow these cells until the cows come home. | ||
| I mean, you don't need a lot of different cell lines in order to keep these cells going. | ||
| I hear that I talked about a lot. | ||
| Cell lines. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Cell lines? | ||
| In other words, an original line of cells taken from one particular fertilized situation? | ||
| Okay, well, there are literally, okay, how can I say this? | ||
| There are three basic tissues within the body. | ||
| There's the endoderm, there's the mesoderm, and there's the ectoderm. | ||
| And excuse me for biology 101 here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But the endoderm is the internal layer of our bodies. | ||
| Our bodies are tubes within tubes. | ||
| When you think about it, your lungs are a set of tubes. | ||
| Your gastrointestinal tract is a set of tubes. | ||
| Your stomach is a tube. | ||
| We're built like tubes inside of tubes inside of tubes. | ||
| Well, the endoderm cells become the pancreas, the liver, the thyroid, the lungs, the bladder. | ||
| The mesoderm, which is the middle layer, becomes bone marrow, skeletal tissue, heart, and blood cells. | ||
| And the ectoderm becomes the skin, the neurons, the pituitary gland, the eyes, the ears. | ||
| Now, when you grow these stem cells, when you take the egg and the ovum and you grow it up to five days to a blastocyte, well, there are, you know, some of these embryonic cells will differentiate into these three, you know, if you let the cells grow beyond five days to say 14 days to two weeks, you'll end up with these three different germ layers. | ||
| And you can start getting more specific on what you want those stem cells to become. | ||
| See, there are stem cells that will become muscle. | ||
| There are stem cells that will become bone. | ||
| There are stem cells that will become brain tissue, stem cells that will become heart tissue, or stem cells that become blood tissue. | ||
| So there's different lines of stem cells. | ||
| So then, if you were going after something that would cure or alleviate Alzheimer's, you would be going after stem cells that are going to become brain cells? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| And that becomes apparent after this five-day period or by the five-day period? | ||
| No, after the five-day period. | ||
| How much after? | ||
| About 14 days. | ||
| 14 days. | ||
| Is there any way that you can remove stem cells from a developing fetus without destroying it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You can take amniotic fluid. | ||
| So, what the hell's the argument about that? | ||
| Well, that's a good question, isn't it, Art? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Probably all about money and power, just like everything else. | ||
| Well, no, no. | ||
| My assumption - I thought I was going to get a great big no, there's no way to do it, because the assumption is the political maelstrom against it is because you've destroyed life. | ||
| What somebody considers life, right? | ||
| Well, that's the story that is put out into the press. | ||
| But, you know, anyone who bothers to read an article, a single scientific article about it, understands that stem cells, they're not just embryonic stem cells, they're adult stem cells. | ||
| You can take stem cells from adults, take it right out of their blood. | ||
| You can take stem cells. | ||
| The richest source of stem cells is the bone marrow. | ||
| But there's got to be an advantage in these very... | ||
| The earlier stem cells are more powerful and you can do more things with them. | ||
| But you don't have to kill fetuses to get them. | ||
| Or harm or maim in some way. | ||
| In other words, you're telling me these stem cells could be removed and the fetus would have every chance of growing or as good a chance of growing into a normal well. | ||
| Ah, a well. | ||
| Okay, here, let me give you a well. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You know, a fetus is only going to grow into a baby if the fetus is implanted in a womb. | ||
| And so the line in the sand, if you will. | ||
| So far, anyway. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, or put into an artificial womb. | ||
| But that's, again, science fiction a little bit far forward. | ||
| But right now, you know, you don't get babies unless you have a womb to grow them in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, we can do everything that I've talked about in a laboratory in glassware without ever touching a woman, without ever touching a human being, without ever touching, you know, anything else. | ||
| All you have to do is take an in vitro, and it's done every day of the week, by the way, in in vitro fertilization labs. | ||
| I mean, all these people who want to have babies, who want to have artificial insemination or want to have some sort of, you know, chemically enhanced fertilization, they're growing fetuses all day long in glassware. | ||
| Well, then what the hell's the problem? | ||
| Well, the problem is that there are some people in positions of power who don't want to see this technology come to be. | ||
| Based on what? | ||
| And why? | ||
| With what motivation? | ||
| Just lay it out. | ||
| Well, you know, I can tell you firsthand, and I don't want to speculate too far, but I'm sure there are people with very good intentions who just aren't, you know, who feel that anything to do that fools with the mechanisms of human life is something that shouldn't be touched. | ||
| And so that's a knee-jerk kind of reaction, even though you're not killing anything. | ||
| Even though in vitro fertilization laboratories in the United States, they have, I read some report that said there was something like 400,000 fetuses that were being discarded because there was no use for them. | ||
| They were just sitting in cold storage. | ||
| Cold storage. | ||
| Dr. Klatz, hold on. | ||
| We're at the top of the hour. | ||
| I've got a lot. | ||
| As I imagine, a great deal of the audience has a lot to digest over what I just heard, frankly. | ||
| From the high desert in the middle of the night, which is where we do our business, this is Coast to Coast AM. | ||
|
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Happy birthday, happy birthday. | |
| Interested in a trip to the moon? | ||
|
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Everything's gone, come on, there's a blue way But feeling good to you and you're feeling good to me There ain't nothing we can do or say Feeling | |
| good, feeling fine Oh, baby, there's a blue way Oh, baby, there's a blue way Oh, baby, there's a blue way | ||
| Oh, baby, there's a blue way For the time Oh, baby, there's a blue way To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295. | ||
| The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222. | ||
| To talk with Art Bell from East of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033. | ||
| From west to the Rockies, call ART at 800-618-8255. | ||
| International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903. | ||
| From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. | ||
| So there are these little tiny molding pieces of clay type cells called stem cells that if injected into you, for example, will go in and fix your heart or fix your lung or fix whatever is wrong with you. | ||
| Stem cells. | ||
| That's what they are. | ||
| That's what we're talking about. | ||
| In a moment, we're going to try and find out what's all the big ruckus. | ||
|
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We'll be right back. | |
| Well, I think I clearly understand why we're having such a big struggle About stem cells. | ||
| If you can really do what Dr. Klatz has told us they can do, cure a heart, cure a lung, give us brain tissue that raises Alzheimer's, and on and on it goes. | ||
| If stem cells really can do this, then I really do want to understand. | ||
| I mean, the President of the United States, and lawmakers have looked at this carefully, presumably, hopefully, I mean, somewhere somebody is violently in opposition to doing this. | ||
| And I guess I need to, if you can put yourself in their position, because surely you have to listen to them, Dr. Klatz, so you must be able to articulate their position and their argument pretty well if you try. | ||
| Not easily, Art. | ||
| We'll try. | ||
| I will try, but the amazing thing to me is that you have essentially an incredible breakthrough technology that will change all of medicine as we know it, that every other major country in the world is racing headlong and funding as fast and as hard as it can to bring into reality. | ||
| Countries such as England, France, Italy. | ||
| Some of the countries you just named are every bit as Christian as are we. | ||
| Yes, they are. | ||
| And the British government just about a month and a half ago opened a stem cell research center using embryonic stem cells and funding it to the tune of $30 million, which for the Brits is a good chunk of change because their health care system is not nearly as well endowed as ours. | ||
| The Indians have, the nation of India has a big stem cell research project going. | ||
| The Australians have announced huge stem cell projects. | ||
| Even Harvard Medical School, excuse me, Harvard University is in the process of trying to privately fund a $100 million research center for stem cell research because that's how promising this technology is. | ||
| Realize stem cells have the potential, have already shown the ability to reverse diabetes. | ||
| Let me understand something, Doctor. | ||
| I think I've got the picture on what the possibilities are, and they're staggering. | ||
| But in trying to understand what the law is right now, is it simply public money that is not by law allowed to be used for this line of research, or does that include private money as well? | ||
| Private money is a separate issue. | ||
| Totally? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| The moratorium is against any public funds, government funds, being used for embryonic stem cell research. | ||
| Now, adult stem cells is a different animal, but embryonic stem cells are untouchable. | ||
| And realize the moratorium is as good as an outright ban. | ||
| No researcher is going to even get within 10 feet of it because his entire university could be shut down as far as federal funding goes. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, again, make your best shot. | ||
| What's the best or your argument? | ||
| I hesitate to say that. | ||
| The best shot is going to get me shot. | ||
| I have to worry about my own longevity here, Michael. | ||
| Risk it for us if you wouldn't mind, please. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I want to understand why the opposition, I think the audience. | ||
| I think that you had a knee-jerk reaction from the anti-abortion lobby that is intimately involved with the current power establishment in Washington. | ||
| And I think that there was a lot of kowtowing to those people who just knee-jerked and said, well, this sounds too much like abortion for us, and we don't want any part of it. | ||
| In addition to that, you have, you know, who else supports the power structure in Washington? | ||
| Well, you've got a lot of oil money, you have a lot of pharmaceutical money. | ||
| The pharmaceutical companies do not stand to win if a cure for disease is found. | ||
| They make their money on selling pills that treat chronic degenerative disease and ameliorate the symptoms. | ||
| They're not into the curing business, they're into the treating business. | ||
| And so you can understand why the powers that be with the current pharmaceutical industry is not really behind coming up with something that would eliminate the need for perhaps 50 percent of all drugs that are taken every day by the American public. | ||
| So then who, doctor, is the President being influenced by, the anti-abortion people or the pharmaceutical interests? | ||
| Well, I think that there are several interests that do not want to see stem cells developed, but you can't hold it back because just because interestingly enough, we went so far in the United States as to try and pass legislation through the United Nations to make stem cell research not just in the United States but around the world a crime. | ||
| And thankfully, it never saw the light of day. | ||
| Right, but the motivation behind trying to make it a crime here with public money or worldwide, I mean, just to do away with it, what do you see as the number one opposition? | ||
| Is it pharmaceutical money? | ||
| That's a dark thought. | ||
| Or is it religious belief? | ||
| Well, clearly there is, you know, if you read the literature, and that's all I have, you know, I'm not involved in this smoke-filled star chambers where these people make their plans for the world. | ||
| I only know what I read and what I hear from other researchers. | ||
| And what's in the news and what's being talked about is some of these far, far-right anti-abortion people who equate anything that has to do with human life as being a verboten subject and should be forbidden, regardless of how much potential it has to do good for humanity. | ||
| But on what leg Do they stand from a spiritual point of view? | ||
| If what you told me is correct and the embryo is not destroyed by the removal of stem cells, then where is there a blastocyte, the fetal tissue is destroyed, but it's made in a laboratory. | ||
| This is not a child. | ||
| These are cells that are put together in a laboratory. | ||
| But these are cells that, if continued. | ||
| Well, if you were to go and find a woman somewhere and alien abductees and spirit her off somehow and take these cells out of the test tube and inject them into her, which would be completely unethical as well, then perhaps these cells would have a chance of developing into a human life, but they have zero chance in a laboratory. | ||
| This is just what's being done in the same thing as being done in fertilization research every day. | ||
| So the blasticide in laboratory conditions is destroyed in the removal of these stem cells. | ||
| It is, but it's never going to become a human being. | ||
| It never was a human being, nor does it have any potential to become a human being without incredible, extraordinary measures that would not occur in the United States or any place else as far as I can tell because it would be completely unethical to do this. | ||
| Now, to do what you're suggesting is called human cloning, which is a different animal altogether. | ||
| You see, if you were to take... | ||
| What do you mean I'm suggesting cloning? | ||
| I'm sorry, you're not suggesting it, but if you wanted to take that biological material, the egg and the sperm, make a blastocyte, throw it in a test tube, and then want it to become a human being, you would have to implant it into a woman. | ||
| Got that. | ||
| And that's what people who want to do human cloning, reproductive cloning, want to do. | ||
| And there's a good argument against that, in my opinion, from a bioethical point of view, whether we want to allow human clones. | ||
| And most scientists, certainly better than 70% that I talk to, are against human cloning at this time for reproductive purposes. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, Art, can I just talk about the Academy for one second? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You know, I'm the president of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, and we're a medical society of 12,500 doctors from 35 countries around the world. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And we're having our 12th International Congress in Chicago in August. | ||
| And I'd like to invite you and your listeners, and I have an incredible, incredible deal for anyone who wants to show up. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Are you going to be able to make it to Chicago in August? | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| I'd love to have you there. | ||
| August 21st and 22nd, we're going to have thousands of doctors from around the world who are working right now on stem cell technology and sports medicine, laser surgery, bioidentical hormones, all aspects of anti-aging medicine. | ||
| And if any of your listeners would like to show up, we've opened up the exhibit area to the general public. | ||
| And for $19, they can register to attend the conference. | ||
| And I'm going to give them a copy of my book. | ||
| You have a copy of it, The New Anti-Aging Revolution. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| It's 626 pages long. | ||
| It sells for $24.95. | ||
| And you can get that. | ||
| And dozens of free goodies and a CD-ROM of anti-aging research. | ||
| And the whole package is worth retail, about $250. | ||
| But for $19, they can come to the conference, talk to hundreds, if not thousands, of doctors, attended in Chicago. | ||
| It's the Air and Water Show weekend in Chicago, so there's lots of things to do. | ||
| And anyone who wants to get in on that deal can just call this number and find out more. | ||
| You got a number? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 773-347-1277. | ||
| That's 773 Chicago. | ||
| 347-1277. | ||
| Or they can register online and get a free copy of my book, The Anti-Aging Revolution, which talks about everything we're talking about right now and a whole lot more. | ||
| And that's available at www.worldhealth, worldhealth.net, N-E-T. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks, Arch. | ||
| And the phone number is 773-347-1277. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| If I were ailing, if I had a heart condition, would I be able to go somewhere in the country right now, doctor, and find a physician or a scientist who would inject me with stem cells to help my heart? | ||
| You might be able to. | ||
| There are a few doctors who are doing this privately and privately funded research centers. | ||
| There is research going on at major universities. | ||
| I believe Johns Hopkins has a program going on where they're doing stem cell research for heart disease. | ||
| And overseas, you most certainly could get access to this technology. | ||
| Would I probably have an easier time if I booked a flight to London or whatever? | ||
| Yes, you would. | ||
| You would, because it's still controversial here. | ||
| It's still a little clandestine. | ||
| It's still research. | ||
| And there's only probably in the United States, I would guess, less than 100 clinicians working in this area at this time. | ||
| Let's say I had had a heart attack and I had virtually killed a third of my heart. | ||
| A third of my heart muscle was dead. | ||
| If I were injected appropriately with stem cells... | ||
| There are multiple, you see, again, this is very new technology. | ||
| We don't know what's going to work best. | ||
| There are techniques where they take cells from human placentas, placental cells, which are full of stem cells, And they put that in an IV and they just drip that into your vein. | ||
| And magically, these stem cells for the heart muscle find their way to the heart. | ||
| There are other techniques where they catheterize the heart and they inject stem cells literally around the damaged part of the heart tissue. | ||
| And, doctor, they've proven in animal tests, or human tests, I guess, now, that we really get regeneration of dead heart tissue. | ||
| Absolute regeneration of dead heart tissue. | ||
| To what degree, doctor? | ||
| In animal models, they've grown over a third of an animal's damaged heart back. | ||
| My gosh. | ||
| Over 30%. | ||
| In humans, I believe the number is about 10% of the tissue was regenerated. | ||
| But that was enough to change the person's experience from having angina or chest pain almost all the time, difficulty breathing almost all the time, unable to even raise her arms over her head, to being able to walk without assistance for over a block and to perform all activities of daily living without hardly any pain at all. | ||
| Why, doctor, do you think that so far there's a disparity between what's happened in the lab and in humans? | ||
| Well, we're just early on in this technology. | ||
| Also, it's easier and you oftentimes get better results with animals than you will with people because you can be more aggressive with the animals, and animals tend to have a more robust healing because they tend to be young and fresh and healthier. | ||
| You see, in animal models, you have to create a heart attack externally. | ||
| Animals don't generally get heart disease. | ||
| So you have to do something manage the heart. | ||
| So you're dealing with a relatively young, healthy animal to begin with. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| But 10% of heart tissue in humans at this early stage is tremendous. | ||
| Now realize we've also reversed diabetes. | ||
| Reversed it. | ||
| Reversed diabetes. | ||
| That's happening in hundreds, if not thousands, of people right now. | ||
| Reversing diabetes. | ||
| I mean, flat, turning it around. | ||
| No longer need insulin. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| How about Parkinson's disease? | ||
| There are thousands of people now who are significantly, if not completely, improved with Parkinson's disease with stem cell technology. | ||
| That's been going on for many years. | ||
| You see, stem cells aren't all that new. | ||
| We've been doing stem cell work for 40 years. | ||
| It's been called bone marrow transplantation. | ||
| There are some critics of stem cell research who say, look, put it on hold because what stem cells promise, now technology quite quickly may deliver around it. | ||
| What do you say to that? | ||
| Well, if you put it on hold, and it really is on hold to a large extent already, in this country. | ||
| If not, millions will die. | ||
| And millions will suffer needlessly. | ||
| Realize that in America right now, over 100 million people have a chronic degenerative disease. | ||
| But incredible as it is, explain those who are. | ||
| There are a body of people, right, who say that nanotechnology will come along and just take over in this area to the point where stem cell research is not needed. | ||
| What do you say to that argument? | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Well, it may be true, but it's like saying that solar energy will one day obviate the need for oil. | ||
| Well, maybe it will. | ||
| But until that comes along, we still have to keep drilling. | ||
| And that's, I think, the closest analogy I can come up with. | ||
| I mean, nanotechnology may be able to do the amazing things that stem cells do now, but they can't do it now, and they won't be able to do it for at least 10 or 15 years, whereas stem cells can do it now, and certainly within five years. | ||
| It's a much far forward technology, and it's really much closer to natural than nanotechnology. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good enough argument for me. | ||
| How far ahead is the rest of the world? | ||
| I mean, where is the most forward research being done right now? | ||
| Oh, there's a lot of places that are really, well, Singapore, for example. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Singapore has a committed government-sponsored stem cell research program through the University of Singapore. | ||
| The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine is a research partner with them, as a matter of fact, and we do seminars there every year on biotechnology. | ||
| And they're doing fantastic work over there. | ||
| They also have ongoing clinical programs for repair of blindness. | ||
| They're working on rejuvenating retinal tissue. | ||
| The repair of blindness. | ||
| That's another promising area of stem cell research. | ||
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They're able... | |
| Hold on, doctor. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Maybe it'll do this too. | ||
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Turn brown eyes blue. | |
| Probably it will. | ||
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I've been done. | |
| Don't know what's coming over you You found someone new I'm gonna make my breath Blue Blue I've been done. | ||
| When you go, I'll just cry all night long. | ||
| Say it is untrue. | ||
| And don't I make my bright eyes. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| No, I don't want to fall in love. | ||
| No, I don't want to fall in love with you. | ||
| What a wicked place to make me feel this way. | ||
| What a wicked thing to do. | ||
| To let me dream of you. | ||
| What a wicked thing to say. | ||
| You never felt this way. | ||
| What a wicked thing to do. | ||
| To make me dream of you and I. What do you think, folks? | ||
| Is it a wicked game the doctor is playing, or is it all about life? | ||
| Nothing less than life. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Your life. | ||
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To talk with Art Bell. | |
| Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295. | ||
| The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222. | ||
| To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033. | ||
| From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255. | ||
| International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903. | ||
| From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. | ||
| America or Wicked Workins? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Life itself, nothing short of that. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| I guess it's good to personalize it, perhaps. | ||
| Ben in Anchorage, Alaska asks the following, would you please ask Dr. Klatz if we currently actually have the technology to have saved Ronald Reagan's life? | ||
| I understand that he died in the very end of complications of pneumonia, which I guess came from or grew from his state in Alzheimer's. | ||
| do we have technology to have saved his life? | ||
| I think we do. | ||
| I think the technology is here to, well, let's put it this way. | ||
| In the laboratory, we certainly do. | ||
| Have we been able to reverse Alzheimer's disease in humans? | ||
| No. | ||
| We've been able to slow it down. | ||
| There is some evidence to suggest that a vaccine that we do have, that has been tried, actually reversed some aspects of Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| It was tested in a number of individuals, I think about 50, and they stopped the study very early on because the vaccine led to inflammation within the brain, and some people had some adverse side effects. | ||
| They stopped the study right away. | ||
| But when they went back and they looked at the results of the people who had received the vaccine, many of those people who had received the vaccine had slowed down and perhaps even reversed some of their beta-amyloid protein that forms within the brain that leads to the brain damage that we call Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| So we have a vaccine that works nicely in animals, doesn't work well enough in people yet to have a major impact on and being close to a shot of reversing or at least stalling Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| We have drugs that can slow down the process of Alzheimer's disease, but we don't have a cure for it just yet. | ||
| Now, nobody, to my knowledge, has used stem cells to reverse Alzheimer's disease yet, certainly not in people. | ||
| Can I ask a sort of an off-to-the-side question? | ||
| Can you explain Alzheimer's to us? | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| Alzheimer's disease is a syndrome that leads to mental decline and to loss, ultimately to loss of physiologic function because of brain damage. | ||
| It occurs because some people, for whatever reason, whether it be a virus or it be a metabolic anomaly or some toxin that we don't fully understand, causes the deposition of an aberrant protein within the brain. | ||
| This protein is called a beta-amyloid. | ||
| And this aberrin protein, when it forms within the brain, creates inflammation. | ||
| And the inflammation creates damage. | ||
| The inflammation stimulates the production of white blood cells, macrophages, which go in and try and eat up the protein. | ||
| But in the process, they eat healthy living brain tissue. | ||
| And you end up losing, your brain shrinks from the inside out. | ||
| And so some people are suggesting, some doctors are suggesting the use of anti-inflammatories such as aspirin or Motrin because in people who take these drugs for other purposes have a much lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| There's a kind of an excitement going on about anti-inflammatories right now, isn't there? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| We're finding that many diseases are mediated, not necessarily caused by, but their progression is mediated by inflammation. | ||
| It may be that you develop a virus or you develop an infection of some sort, and that leads to inflammation, but it's the inflammation that causes the actual damage to the tissue. | ||
| So even if you had the virus, okay, you can live with that, but it's the inflammation that causes the damage to the tissue that leads to the disease. | ||
| For example, we're finding that cancers, certain cancers, absolutely get started with a viral infection. | ||
| And that the virus leads to an inflammatory state, and the inflammatory state leads to irritation, which leads to the growth of a cancer cell. | ||
| And the imagination, therefore, says, okay, if it's a virus, then maybe there is an inoculation. | ||
| There may be. | ||
| But certainly, there's also, if inflammation is part of the equation, if we block the inflammation, we can block the progression of the disease. | ||
| You may still have, for example, with Alzheimer's, you may still have that protein, that aberrant protein in your brain, but if it doesn't allow inflammation, if we somehow block the inflammation from occurring in response to that protein, you may be able to go on just fine with that aberrant protein being there. | ||
| Very interesting. | ||
| Yes, I've been hearing that. | ||
| This is the promise of anti-aging medicine. | ||
| This is medicine for the next millennium. | ||
| This is what we're talking about. | ||
| And this kind of technology can lead to not just a better quality of life, but a longer lifespan as well. | ||
| And that's what's so exciting because we're on the cusp of these amazing breakthroughs because the entire biotech revolution is ready to give birth to dozens, if not hundreds, of innovations, almost all of which will have an anti-aging spin to it. | ||
| And any one of which, any one great breakthrough could lead to five-year, 10-year, 20-year increase in maximum lifespan. | ||
| Okay, doctor, this big battle that we're having in America right now and other parts of the world, I guess, to a lesser degree. | ||
| You said, for example, that adult stem cells, they don't have any problem with that, and other aspects of some lines. | ||
| But what we're fighting over, is it the most important, where the fight centers, is it the most important place for you as a researcher or for a researcher? | ||
| Is it prohibiting the most important place? | ||
| Well, the problem is that the chilling effect of a moratorium, of a federal moratorium, on funding for stem cell research extends not just into embryonic stem cells, but it stems through the entire stem cell research protocols. | ||
| And so researchers who would normally be moving in to exploit these technologies are standing on the sidelines. | ||
| Universities that would be jumping in are keeping away. | ||
| Venture capital money is not flooding into this field as it would be otherwise. | ||
| And so this controversy, if you will, is putting a damper on stem cell research in total. | ||
| Across the board. | ||
| Across the board. | ||
| If they were only to specifically eliminate certain embryonic cell lines, then who cares? | ||
| We could work our way around it. | ||
| We could live without that perhaps. | ||
| But this is a wet towel that's being thrown over the entire issue of stem cell technology. | ||
| And what you're doing is you're inhibiting technology which almost certainly will lead to major breakthroughs in a very short period of time and save lives and improve the quality of lives for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. | ||
| Well, we're back to this why business. | ||
| And, you know, you really threw in a hot potato that the pharmaceutical industries don't want to see real cures for things they sell pills for. | ||
| I mean, that's a gigantic indictment. | ||
| I hate to make that indictment, and I really don't want to make that indictment personally. | ||
| Well, is that more of it, or is it the religion? | ||
| I think there's more than just religion. | ||
| I don't see protesters out there with picket signs in front of stem cell research centers like you would at abortion clinics. | ||
| I can understand people's emotional and religious ferocity with regard to the issue of abortion. | ||
| It can be very visceral for many people. | ||
| And I just don't see that around stem cells. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| Not the way you've described it. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| And so you have to ask yourself, what would move our entire higher senior level of government to thwart this technology specifically and go so far as to try and create a moratorium at the United Nations? | ||
| What would drive our entire? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Let's go through them. | ||
| Money, fear, what? | ||
| Well, Art, you're much more adept at this than I am, sir. | ||
| I'm just a poor, lowly country doctor. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| But I don't want to say things I don't have first-hand information about either, Art. | ||
| I mean, I'd love to tell you what the answer is. | ||
| I'm in a quandary just like everyone else, but it certainly doesn't make sense because there are no dead bodies. | ||
| There are no dead babies. | ||
| This is a win-win-win-win scenario for everyone except those people who are entrenched in a disease-based medical model and know what they will do to hold on to power. | ||
| Well, but one would think that the pharmaceutical companies would get right into the middle of it and would be selling bags and bags of stem cells or something. | ||
| Well, when you have a drug, a pill that you can make for a lot of money and sell for $5 a pill, and you're selling billions of them a year, it's kind of hard to give that up or to look five years into the future and see that there's going to be not another pill that you can sell, | ||
| but a cure, and it won't just be yours either because you've got to lock on this particular pill, but stem cells are not as easy to lock in. | ||
| They're more ubiquitous. | ||
| Yes, but if, for example, the big breakthrough comes in Tokyo, then it's going to get here anyway. | ||
| If it exists really in the world, whether it's the Japanese or the British or whoever it is who... | ||
| I agree with you entirely. | ||
| But people who have, you know, on the top of the pyramid, they certainly want to hold on to what they've got as long as they can hold on to it. | ||
| And let's put it this way. | ||
| I don't see the pharmaceuticals companies standing in line to go fund stem cell research. | ||
| So, if they're not funding it and they're not endorsing it, what are they doing? | ||
| Well, are they just sitting back and waiting for someone else to make that decision? | ||
| And again, I'm not going to sit, you know, I don't want to sit here and malign anyone or cast aspersions on anyone. | ||
| I'm just like you. | ||
| I'm an observer. | ||
| Entire industries, you can cast aspersions on them if you want to, I guess. | ||
| If that's really what you think. | ||
| And I think the bottom line is that is what you think, right? | ||
| I think that there are decisions that are made at the very highest levels of government and industry that are not made for humanitarian reasons. | ||
| They're made simply on the basis of the bottom line. | ||
| Money. | ||
| and are simply made on the basis of maintaining the status quo of power and authority. | ||
| and I... | ||
| All right. | ||
| Art, let's put it this way. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| No, no, you can't take me there, Art. | ||
| That's not fair. | ||
| I'm not going to get on this oak box and start railing against the gerontologists who are dying of old age just like the rest of us for trying to thwart the progress in anti-aging research. | ||
| You're not going to get me there, Art. | ||
| As much as I like you. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But you know what I would like to take you to? | ||
| All right, what? | ||
| I'd love to take you to our 12th International Congress in Chicago because there are going to be thousands of doctors there from all over the world who know all about stem cells and nanotechnology and regenerative medicine and latest cosmetic surgical procedures and biodentical hormones and DNA and mitochondrial repair. | ||
| I mean, all the latest technology. | ||
| You come for free. | ||
| Any of your listeners, I'm going to let them in for $19, at least into the exhibit hall. | ||
| And there's going to be hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of doctors. | ||
| How's that for a deal? | ||
| Well, it sounds interesting. | ||
| I guess, what? | ||
| People will stand up and deliver the latest of what they're going to have. | ||
| We're going to have two presentations, all by scientists from major universities around the world. | ||
| And we're going to have 200 companies that are going to be showing their latest technologies, everything from lasers to laboratory equipment to new pills and potions and lotions for eliminating wrinkles and making you look young and sexy and feeling young and sexy. | ||
| I mean, the whole nine yards. | ||
| And it's a $19 deal, and they get my book for free. | ||
| And they get a CD-ROM with all the copies of Anti-Aging Medical News, which is the official journal of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine for the last seven years. | ||
| And they get a bag full of goodies on top of it. | ||
| How's that for a deal? | ||
| Pretty cool. | ||
| Only because your listeners are. | ||
| Well, how about that? | ||
| And they only have to go to worldhealth.net on the internet. | ||
| Worldhealth.net, and there's even a special deal for Art Bell listeners where they can call our office in Chicago at 773-347-1277. | ||
| And we're doing this really at cost because we're trying to build a constituency of people who are going to demand technologies such as stem cell technologies and other anti-aging technologies to save your life, my life, and the lives of everyone we hold near and dear. | ||
| Yeah, you sound like a pep rally person for your cause, for sure. | ||
| I mean, you're really solidly... | ||
| Age? | ||
| You bet. | ||
| I'm dying day by day. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I don't like it. | ||
| Do you really think that in your lifetime, and that's the big question, right? | ||
| The selfish big question, that in your lifetime, something will turn the clock back for you sufficiently. | ||
|
unidentified
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You bet? | |
| Oh, you bet. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm 40. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I'm 49 in just a few weeks. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And biologically, I'm testing out about 41 right now. | ||
| And that's okay, not good enough, but I'm working on it. | ||
| And the technologies of stem cells, nanotechnology, DNA repair could quite probably add an extra 20 years of lifespan to everyone who is under the age of 65 who's listening to your show right now when they come to be. | ||
| And these technologies are only a few years away from being widely available. | ||
| Even the technologies that exist right now in anti-aging with hormone replacement therapy, antioxidant therapies, rehabilitative regenerative medicine technologies. | ||
| Couldn't there even be a little bit of, look, we can't stand that many more people in the world behind some of this. | ||
| After all, the world is in some ways strained with the billions that we presently have upon it. | ||
| Anything that would extend that life would have to, by nature, bring a lot of things with it, like, I don't know, Chinese-type laws about how many children you can have or can't have. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| You've hit on probably the only fly in the ointment with regard to anti-aging, and that is that people will be around for a very long time. | ||
| Well, I specialize in ointment and flies, and I deal in that, and so let's talk about that for a second. | ||
| It's a big problem. | ||
| Well, it is, except that we have some experience in this area. | ||
| In the last hundred years, life expectancy in the first world has increased over 20 years. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Average life expectancy has increased over 20 years over the last 100 years. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| In 1990 in the United States, average life expectancy was, actually it's more than 20 years in the United States. | ||
| This is in the world it's been 20 years. | ||
| In the United States, average life expectancy in the year 1900 was 47 years of age. | ||
| Today, it is 77, 78. | ||
| Some people say 79 years of age. | ||
| Keep it up. | ||
| You're going to bust Social Security right down to the ground. | ||
| Well, that's one of the things that the government is very afraid of with regard to these anti-aging technologies. | ||
| Can you blame them? | ||
| They write the checks. | ||
| I can't blame them at all in that regard. | ||
| But the good news is that in the first world, at least, the reproductive level, the birth rate has dropped precipitously as the quality of life increases. | ||
| And because of that, actual reproduction, if you exclude immigration, is negative. | ||
| We have a negative population growth in Italy, Germany, England, and the United States. | ||
| In other words, don't worry, folks. | ||
| Selfishness will save us. | ||
| Hey, doctor, hold on. | ||
| We've got another hour to go, and we're going to open the phone lines. | ||
| Dr. Ronald Klatz is my guest. | ||
|
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Now it begins. | |
| Now that you've gone. | ||
| Needles and pins. | ||
| What have you done? | ||
| Watching that star. | ||
| Till you return. | ||
| Tidying that door. | ||
| And watching you burn. | ||
| Now it begins. | ||
| Day after day. | ||
| Interested in a trip to the moon? | ||
|
unidentified
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Music I'm not going to lie. | |
| Abumba, abumba. | ||
| I live in a safari, my mother. | ||
| Abumba. | ||
| Can you hear my heartbeat in this garden? | ||
| Do you know that the heart of this cross Lies the titi sayak a mele De kumone for a itame I'm not To talk with Art Bell. | ||
| Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295. | ||
| The first-time caller line is Area Code 775-727-1222. | ||
| To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033. | ||
| From West to the Rockies, call ART at 800-618-8255. | ||
| International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903. | ||
| From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. | ||
| This is interesting. | ||
| Lewis Young in Lake Charles, Louisiana, fascinated by tonight's topic, writes, Hey, Art, if life extension becomes possible, as is posited by your guest and others, wouldn't the state have to pay to keep people serving, say, 900 years in prison alive, like they do for AIDS treatments for others right now? | ||
| Wouldn't they have to do that? | ||
|
unidentified
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*gunshot* *gunshot* | |
| Well, that one at you, Doctor, the 900 years in prison, you know, I mean, we do that for AIDS patients now. | ||
| Very expensive medicines, but we supply them and have to do so, I guess, by law. | ||
| Maybe the answer is not to incarcerate people for 900 years. | ||
| Maybe the answer is if you want to get rid of them, then get rid of them, be done with it. | ||
| And if you think you can rehabilitate them, then rehabilitate them and be done with it. | ||
| You know, we have to do that. | ||
| No, I'm suggesting that there's something wrong with our system where we have something like 7 million Americans who are either in prison or on parole right now. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| I mean, that's the highest number of any civilized nation in the world, I think, of any nation in the world. | ||
| What the heck is going on here? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Okay, and, you know, it's spurious to argue that anti-aging is going to, you know, shouldn't be done because we have people in prison. | ||
| Well, let's either rehabilitate them if possible and get them out of prison. | ||
| Or. | ||
| Or. | ||
| Or the other thing. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| If I could just say one thing, and it's not about the Congress, the anti-aging Congress in Chicago, August 20th through the 23rd. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Okay, I'm not going to talk about that until you let me. | ||
| But I need to say one thing, and that is that earlier we were talking about the pharmaceutical industry, and I'm not trying to give these guys a black eye because I think overall the pharmaceutical industries do a lot of good things, but I think there, again, is something wrong with the system. | ||
| Well, Chuck in Holland, Michigan says, hey, pharmacy is one group, but what about health insurance companies? | ||
| Well, when I say, I'm talking about the health industries in America, we have a system of economies that are driven by finance and not by humanitarianism. | ||
| And so that's why, that's really the reason I believe that you don't see these pharmaceutical companies funding stem cells and why they may be in favor of stem cells not seeing the light of day. | ||
| It's not that they're so necessarily bad guys sitting there plotting evil as they are bean counters sitting there counting the next quarter's profits. | ||
| But I can still see your teeth marks on their hand. | ||
| So, I mean, but, you know, I mean, insurance companies, there is an entire health auxiliary. | ||
| It's sort of a satellite industry around the inner core of real health care, right? | ||
| There's this auxiliary giant thing around it that includes life insurance and health companies and all my God. | ||
| It goes on and on. | ||
| It's the biggest industry in the United States, in the Western world. | ||
| It's absolutely huge, and it's all built on a disease-based model of health care. | ||
| Well, absolutely. | ||
| And so if all these people earn a living from maintaining a disease-based model of health care, well, woe be it for someone such as myself who's preaching about a preventive medicine model of health care. | ||
| Right, so woe be you. | ||
| Are you woeful? | ||
| In other words, have they gotten to you? | ||
| Well, we've taken our lumps. | ||
| There have been people who have been out there using the current. | ||
| But I mean, how do they give you a lump? | ||
| I mean, do they say, don't you dare, don't you dare cure that disease? | ||
| Well, no, they do things like they fund people of spurious credentials who say that anti-aging is fraud and that anti-aging medicine has no basis in science and that the doctors who are behind it don't know what they're talking about and that there's no such thing as anti-aging and nothing can be done to slow the aging process. | ||
| It's like the UFO thing. | ||
| I mean, there's been Dr. Fieldgood's elixir since the beginning of time, right? | ||
| Absolutely true. | ||
| Absolutely true. | ||
| But that's not what we're talking about with the people. | ||
| No, but they can sort of throw that out on you, I guess. | ||
| And that's exactly what has happened, and that has slowed the progression of preventive medicine, but not very much. | ||
| It's just kind of like stem cells, you know. | ||
| You can't stop good science. | ||
| You can't stop the truth forever. | ||
| And anti-aging medicine, the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, which began just 12 years ago with 12 doctors, we have over 12,500 now. | ||
| And this year we're going to train over 20,000 doctors around the world. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Now you are exposed to them. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello. | |
| Hello. | ||
| You're on the air with Dr. Klatz. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, I'm Jan, and I think you presented everything very well as far as explaining everything in depth. | |
| There was only two points that I think may be confusing to the listeners. | ||
| And the first one was that all of there's two things, and one is an adult stem cell, and the other is embryonic stem cell. | ||
| Nobody in our country has a problem with adult stem cell research. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
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I mean, that is clearly, everybody is in agreement with that. | |
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I think the confusion comes in is that when you were relaying everything, is that all of the good results that have come so far have come from adult stem cells. | |
| Miss Minnesota, Eliza Huberman over at Argonne. | ||
| Miss Minnesota, Eliza Huberman over at Argonne. | ||
| There is a lot of good work being done with adult stem cells, but also embryonic stem cells. | ||
| There's a tremendous amount of research that's dependent on embryonic stem cells as well. | ||
| The whole point is you don't have to kill anything to make embryonic stem cells. | ||
| Nevertheless, the question is, how important is the embryonic aspect of it versus work with adult stem cells? | ||
| How important is that? | ||
| We don't know yet. | ||
| It's too early on, but all indications are that embryonic is very important. | ||
| The ability to create the cell lines, the different tissues. | ||
| Why do you think that might be? | ||
| Why, at the embryonic level, is it? | ||
| Because the closer you get to gestation, the more powerful and the more pluripotent the cell is. | ||
| The more likely it is to be immortal, the more the cell is able to differentiate into multiple cell lines, and the less antigenic it is or its ability to be recognized by the immune system. | ||
| You see, it's one issue to put in stem cells. | ||
| It's another thing to have it be accepted by the body as self. | ||
| Which necessitates what? | ||
| Which means that... | ||
| You need matching cells. | ||
| Or you need a cell line that doesn't have much in the way of antigenicity on it so that it's not recognized by the immune system as being non-self. | ||
| And those more likely come from embryonic? | ||
| Come from the younger the tissue, the closer to the embryonic tissue, the more likely it is not to be recognized as non-self. | ||
| Also, the easier it is to manipulate and the easier it is to do research with. | ||
| So you might not need a specific donor if you're dealing with cells at the embryonic level? | ||
| No. | ||
| Or another thing that is interesting is called somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which case you could potentially take your own cells, a skin cell or blood cell, and take a manufactured ovum, | ||
| an egg cell that was grown specifically for the purpose without its own DNA in it, an empty egg cell, and inject your own DNA and grow that up in a test tube, and now you'd be growing up cells for transplantation that were your own cells. | ||
| Is there anything illegal about that? | ||
| Well, it is, again, in the realm of, well, it may not be. | ||
| It may not be. | ||
| It may not fall on the line of embryonic tissue. | ||
| So that might be something they can do now? | ||
| It may be something that could be done right now. | ||
| See, this is all very gray and blurry areas. | ||
| You know, I think that the line in the sand is, again, if you're not implanting these cells into a womb, you have no chance of making a human being. | ||
| You just have two cells there, or 100 cells. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Ronald Klatz. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello. | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, my name is Thomas. | |
| Just give me your first name. | ||
|
unidentified
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From San Diego? | |
| Yes. | ||
| I was wondering if you guys think that stem cells can help ALS and the PLS. | ||
| Okay, fair question. | ||
| Very interesting with ALS. | ||
| There was a recent paper published, I believe, in Science just a few weeks ago with regard to animals that develop ALS-type symptoms. | ||
| And they were able to slow down the progression, not cure it, but slow down the progression of ALS quite dramatically simply by giving mice that are engineered to produce ALS-type disease by a factor of three weeks, which in humans would be slowing down ALS if it translated to humans, by three years. | ||
| That the stem cells actually went to the damaged tissue in the nervous system and actually regrew nervous tissue in these ALS model mice. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| You mentioned earlier that a blind person, perhaps somebody else. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| You mentioned earlier that a blind person might, perhaps even from birth, might be made to be able to see. | ||
| How do you envision, how could that happen? | ||
| Well, right now, research is underway to regrow corneas from stem cells, to regrow retinas and repair retinas with stem cells. | ||
| And it may be as simple as injecting the appropriate cell line into the eyeball. | ||
| And these stem cells will find their way to the damaged retina and regenerate it. | ||
| In France right now, they are doing work in animals that have the equivalent of osteoarthritis of the knee. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they've taken these animals and injected stem cells into the knee joints and been able to grow new cartilage, new chondrular cartilage in the knee joint and essentially repair the knee with stem cells. | ||
| Not perfect yet. | ||
| That's so amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Very encouraging. | |
| It sure is. | ||
| You see, it's so simple. | ||
| That's the scary thing, I think, to people who may be looking at this from an angle other than from a financial angle. | ||
| Because this can be done ubiquitously. | ||
| The material is everywhere. | ||
| All you really need, you know, stem cells can be taken from bone marrow. | ||
| Stem cells can be harvested from blood. | ||
| Stem cells can be taken from fat when people have liposuction for fat contouring. | ||
| Stem cells are everywhere. | ||
| We're finding stem cells. | ||
| And there's just not a problem with any of those stem cells. | ||
| It's just those real early ones. | ||
| Just the real early ones. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Ronald Klapps. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, Art. | |
| This is Matt in Colorado. | ||
| Hello, Matt. | ||
|
unidentified
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I was born with tricuspidaritresia, which is a three-chambered heart of one and a half lungs. | |
| Now, with this stem cell research, could it repair that completely? | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| Well, I'm not familiar with anything that would do that right now. | ||
| You know, you're born with an anomaly. | ||
| To go back far enough in your development to repair the heart, it would have to, I mean, stem cells are not going to, at this stage, are not going to go in and reconfigure your heart muscle. | ||
| Yeah, got it. | ||
| But if you had a scar on your heart, they would go in there and they could potentially repair that scar. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| International Line, you're on the air with Dr. Ronald Klatz. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Going once. | ||
| Going twice. | ||
| Gone. | ||
| Well to the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Turn your radio off, please. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Holding. | ||
| Okay, not up, down. | ||
| Down, the other way. | ||
| Hello? | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| All the way off, dear. | ||
| Turn number two. | ||
| Okay, turn number two off. | ||
| We'll wait. | ||
|
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There. | |
| Okay, now proceed. | ||
| Your name is? | ||
|
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Rosie. | |
| Hey, Rosie. | ||
| Proceed. | ||
|
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Rosie. | |
| Rosie. | ||
| Yep, got Rosie. | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| Okay, Rosie, what's up? | ||
|
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I have an eight-year-old son who had a brain tumor, mygaloblastoma in the brainstem area. | |
| He can't walk, he can't talk, and he can't eat. | ||
| We're uncertain whether or not he has vision. | ||
| And I was just wondering, can that brainstem cell research help something like this? | ||
| Well, it's very interesting you mentioned that because I'm in Fort Lauderdale right now, and I was at the Fourth International Conference on Hyperbaric Medicine and Neurological Disease. | ||
| And several of the speakers were here talking about very early research on children who have neurological damage, cerebral palsy, brainstem stroke, things like that, who are receiving hyperbaric oxygen therapy for repair of their brain tissue, and also, in conjunction with a hyperbaric, receiving stem cell therapy, very early stem cell therapy from the bottom. | ||
| Now, so that everybody understands, hyperbaric, you get put inside a chamber, literally, I believe, and then they change the pressure and they bring in larger amounts of oxygen. | ||
| Is that not true? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yes, they bring the pressure up to an atmosphere and a half to two atmospheres, sometimes a little bit more pressure than that, and they pump in oxygen. | ||
| And because of the increased pressure, they're able to drive many times more of the amount of oxygen that's normally in the tissue, you know, in the blood, into the tissue to create a hypersaturated event within the cells of the body to improve metabolism. | ||
| And that sometimes Will repair or will stimulate the repair of nerve tissue that is not dead but has been shocked or is in a resting phase. | ||
| And so people who have strokes seem to be doing very well with hyperbaric therapy. | ||
| And oftentimes, children or young people who have suffered near-drowning episodes, who appear to be comatose or have severe neurological problems, will improve with hyperbaric therapy. | ||
| Well, to layer on top of hyperbaric therapy, they're now doing early stem cell therapy. | ||
| And some of the, and these are very early results and anecdotal reports, you know, just reports from the patient themselves. | ||
| But some of the reports are quite astounding as to the level of improvement. | ||
| Now, none of them are miraculous that were presented here. | ||
| And there were five cases presented, but the improvement was quite noticeable, and in some cases, dramatic, but not full cures. | ||
| Not full cures. | ||
| But still, this treatment is very interesting. | ||
| My father had cancer, and I remember he was taking that treatment, and I think it was a healing modality kind of thing where it would cause scars to heal faster, that sort of thing. | ||
| Yes, well, hyperbaric oxygen has a very good track record for helping to improve wound healing of all sorts. | ||
| It was originally used for diving injuries and for people with carbon monoxide poisoning, but now the field is expanding quite a bit. | ||
| It's being used now as an adjunct with chemotherapy, with cancer therapy, very effective with strokes and heart disease as well. | ||
| Well, here's a question. | ||
| Here's a question from out of the blue from Artie, I believe, in Reno, Nevada. | ||
| Would you please ask, is there any hope or any thought that stem cell research could eventually do anything for, there's a wild one, mental illness. | ||
| Mental illness. | ||
| Well, I guess it depends on why you're having mental illness. | ||
| You know, some people have mental illness because they've had a very tough childhood or poor parenting or too much stresses in their life or, you know, or psychological environmental issues. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But other people have mental illness because they have chemical imbalances in their brain, which is due to poor rate, which is poor neuroregulation, chemical regulation of stem. | ||
| Yes, stem cells could quite probably help that very much because they find their way to damaged tissue and help to regenerate those tissues. | ||
| So if the mental illness is due to a damage of the tissue, not a genetic error in the tissue, but a damage to the tissue. | ||
| You know, many times people develop mental illness after head injuries. | ||
| That's also correct. | ||
| All right, Doctor, hold on. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If it's going to be effective, these stem cells, if they're going to be effective in Alzheimer's, then certainly one would imagine other diseases of the brain would be effective as well. | ||
| No question about it. | ||
| If this stuff doesn't excite you, then you're just not listening. | ||
| That's about all I can say. | ||
| I'm Art Bell, in the nighttime, which is where we conduct business. | ||
| Riders of the star. | ||
|
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Riders of the star. | |
| You've got this dream about the dudes and nights and then settle down. | ||
| Forget about everything. | ||
| You know he'll always keep moving. | ||
| You know he's never going to stop moving. | ||
| He's rolling. | ||
| He's the road to snow. | ||
| When you wake up, it's a new morning. | ||
| The sun is shining. | ||
| It's a new morning. | ||
| You're going. | ||
| You're going home. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| To talk with Art Bell. | ||
| Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295. | ||
| The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222. | ||
| To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033. | ||
| From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255. | ||
| International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free, 800-893-0903. | ||
| Stem cell research, a step for all of mankind into the immediate, wonderful, sparkling, disease-free future? | ||
| Or some sort of shop of horrors? | ||
| And that's the way it's depicted by many. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
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What do you think? | |
| All right. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| He's all yours. | ||
| Dr. Ronald Klatz. | ||
| Well, wait a minute. | ||
| Just one little thing. | ||
| Dr. Klatz, I know it's very difficult to get you to talk about it, and we have to drag it out of you. | ||
| But I thought I'd just one more time beg you to tell us about your big thing in Chicago. | ||
| Oh, thanks, Art. | ||
| I really hope you can make it. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| You know, they keep me busy on these weekends. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, hey, you could report from the show. | ||
| We're going to have docs from 35 countries around the world. | ||
| I mean, the top researchers in the field of anti-aging medicine, the scientists who are doing the actual work themselves. | ||
| We're going to have several thousand doctors there in attendance. | ||
| And the exposition side of the conference is going to be open to the general public. | ||
| First time we've ever done it in our history of 12 years, but we're trying to build a constituency. | ||
| We're trying to build a movement now of the American public to demand preventive medicine. | ||
| Will it be interesting enough to the average person? | ||
| In other words, one imagines a lot of technical presentations, very technical. | ||
| If they can understand you and your show art, they'll be able to understand the majority of what goes on at the Anti-Aging Expo in Chicago. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, this material is, you know, we try and keep it straightforward. | ||
| Not a lot of jargon and argot associated with it. | ||
| There's a lot of straightforward information that's available that most educated people will be able to understand. | ||
| And so if you're only going for a copy of my book, The New Anti-Aging Revolution, which is on sale in any bookstore for $24.95, you get that for free. | ||
| You get a CD-ROM with seven years' worth of our publication, Anti-Aging Medical News, which is a magazine that goes out to doctors, 100,000 readers around the world. | ||
| You get that on a CD-ROM. | ||
| You get a bag full of goodies. | ||
| The whole package is worth over $225, and we're giving them away for free. | ||
| We're just asking the people to pay $19 for the registration fee so we can print them up a nice badge and put them into the database. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| And it's available to anyone who wants to come, at least anyone who's a listener to your show. | ||
| And the phone number in Chicago is 773-347-1277. | ||
| Or they really need to register online. | ||
| That's the best way at www.worldhealth.net. | ||
| www.worldhealth.net. | ||
| It's August 21st, 22nd, downtown Chicago. | ||
| When these advances, when we make some giant leap, doctor, whether it's in the extension of age or the eradication of a disease of some sort or another. | ||
| I mean, somebody's going to discover this, and then the way it goes is somebody else is going to, I guess, put whatever it is into some kind of production. | ||
| I mean, if there's a way to fix a heart, if there's a way to give eyesight where there was none, there's no way this is going to be cheap, Doctor. | ||
| I mean, somebody's going to get in the way of it somewhere, and there's going to be money made because that's how the world works. | ||
| Unfortunately true. | ||
| But at least the technology will be there, and at least the cure will be there. | ||
| And it may be a little expensive, but I'd rather it be there than not be there. | ||
| Just like right now, what is available in terms of anti-aging, yeah, it's available, but yeah, baby, it costs money, right? | ||
| But it doesn't cost that much. | ||
| Let's talk about anti-aging. | ||
| To get involved in an anti-aging medicine program in 1990, which is when anti-aging became a clinical practice, as it were. | ||
| To go to an anti-aging medicine program was in the neighborhood of $10,000 to $30,000 a year. | ||
| Okay, well, it's 12 years later, 14 years later, I guess, is 1990 anyway. | ||
| And the cost of getting involved in an anti-aging medicine program now can be as low as about $1,500 a year. | ||
| And even if you're on all the bells and whistles of hormonal therapy, you can probably get by for less than $10,000 a year. | ||
| Most people on anti-aging clinical programs are doing it for about $5,000 a year or the cost of a two-pack a day cigarette habit. | ||
| Yes, but if there's some really large breakthrough, then that's going to bring with it a really large price. | ||
| I suspect that you are correct. | ||
| If it can be patented and withheld, it will be. | ||
| Is there any way at all that it could not be patented and withheld? | ||
| That it could be declared some national or world treasure that's beyond petty little things like patents and money-making? | ||
| Well, let's face it, Art, the world doesn't work that way. | ||
| No, the world doesn't work that way. | ||
| But my hope is, and what's giving me the greatest amount of satisfaction is that so much of what we're doing in anti-aging medicine has become internationalized so quickly. | ||
| It all started here in the United States, but I'll tell you, the people in Asia are grabbing this with both fists. | ||
| Oh, I'll bet. | ||
| And they're doing as much to advance these technologies as we are here in the West. | ||
| And so the more global these technologies become and the more places they're developed, the less likely there is that any one person is going to have an absolute monopoly. | ||
| It's kind of like the Internet. | ||
| You know, the Internet is a very dangerous thing for the powers that be because it globalizes and it democratizes information. | ||
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And yet they foolishly seem to be encouraging it. | |
| All right, Doctor, a lot of people want to talk to you. | ||
| First time call online, you're on the air with Dr. Klatz. | ||
|
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Hello. | |
| Good evening. | ||
| Good evening. | ||
|
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Thanks for taking my call, Art. | |
| You're welcome. | ||
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Bless your effort, Dr. Klatz. | |
| Thank you. | ||
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Sir, I have the same condition as Art. | |
| My lower disc has shrunk down from working and meditating in a chair between L4 and L5, and I suffer sometimes from sciatica that can feel like broken glass moving around in my leg. | ||
| Yes, that's a very apt description, actually. | ||
| Broken glass. | ||
| Okay, well, you need not go any further. | ||
| That's exactly what it feels like, and that's exactly what I have. | ||
| It's a degenerative thing as well as from an accident, which helped it along a lot. | ||
| So would there be an application for that sort of degenerative process with stem cells? | ||
| Yes, there would. | ||
| Stem cells would be an excellent application for that because stem cells are already growing cartilage in knees experimentally. | ||
| And actually in humans, they've used some early stem cell research in athletes to try and repair knee damage, which has met with some degree of success. | ||
| So, stem cell has the potential for that technology. | ||
| However, I should tell you, there are some newer methods of bone expanders and non-surgical, relatively non-invasive technologies where a surgeon can put an injection into the spine and inject some silly putty consistency material. | ||
| Silly putty. | ||
| That will, it looks like silly putty, actually. | ||
| It's about that kind of consistency, which will more or less stay in place and will act as a shock absorber where your old disc used to be. | ||
| It's quite effective. | ||
| Again, nothing is a 100% cure, but there are already technologies out there that can more or less alleviate these problems. | ||
| It's really neat to hear about the latest. | ||
| And you have to wonder if you have something like this, what are the odds of getting the latest? | ||
| Well, gee, you have to connect with just the right sort of doctor who's almost a scientist staying around on the cutting edge of things or being in the right place. | ||
| You have to ring the internet, that's for sure. | ||
| At least listen to the Art Bell show. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Ronald Klatz. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
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Hi. | |
| This is Hondo in Canoes Country, Palm Springs. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
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I have two questions. | |
| One, real quick. | ||
| What was the laws in Canada regarding embryonic stem cells? | ||
| And I wanted to know if there was any applications potentially for HIV. | ||
| Okay, all right. | ||
| Hold it right there. | ||
| That's two real good ones. | ||
| Canada. | ||
| I'm not quite sure what the regulations are in Canada. | ||
| It hasn't come across my desk as far as the reading. | ||
| But, you know, I'm not an attorney, and I don't focus on those particular issues. | ||
| I'm more interested in the science. | ||
| Applications for HIV. | ||
| HIV is very promising because HIV is mediated, they believe, at least the official line is that HIV is caused by a virus that specifically attacks the CD4 cells, which are immune cells. | ||
| And by lowering the CD4 cells to a certain level, they turn off your immune or they slow your immunity quite dramatically. | ||
| And so if you could reconstitute the immune system and rebuild those CD4 cells, you could essentially have all the HIV you want and still never have AIDS. | ||
| And there are clearly there are thousands of people who do that who are walking around with the HIV virus who don't manifest AIDS. | ||
| It sounds to me, as I listen tonight, Doctor, like you're saying an awful lot of things that we thought exactly opposite of are caused by viruses. | ||
| I mean, heart problems, from heart problems to, well, I don't know, right on down the line, you're suspecting viruses. | ||
| Is that fairly new? | ||
| It's a fairly new understanding. | ||
| Even cancer may be a virus, huh? | ||
| Well, certain cancers already have been proven to be viruses, at least initiated by viruses. | ||
| We're now suspecting that viruses or other microorganisms may be the initiating event behind atherosclerosis and heart disease. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Ronald Klatz. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
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Hello. | |
| Hi. | ||
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Hello, Art. | |
| Hello, sir. | ||
|
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I got a question for the doctor. | |
| What about spinal bifida? | ||
| I got a three-year-old son that's got spinal bifida. | ||
| Would that help him out, help rejuvenate his nerves that are damaged in his lower back? | ||
| Quite possibly, yes. | ||
| In my studies, in a very interesting, important, I think, mouse study that was reported about six months ago. | ||
| I can't tell you the journal off the top of my head, but they took, again, embryonic stem cells from humans and they severed the mouse's spinal cord. | ||
| And they put these stem cells, these embryonic stem cells, from neural tissue into the mouse's spine, and it regenerated the spine, such that the mouse was able to move its hind legs and was able to maneuver. | ||
| Not walk perfectly. | ||
| It did not create a perfect repair, but it certainly did bridge the damaged nerve cells, and it did create some degree of movement and certainly feeling in the mouse. | ||
| Doctor, in the research, what do you think will prove to be the jump from stem cells, and I've heard this again and again tonight, doing a good job, but only perhaps a third of the way or a half of the way. | ||
| And what do you think might eventually account for the jump to stem cells? | ||
| We got the full activation here, 100%, here we go. | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think that that's what we will end up seeing. | ||
| And where do you think we'll jump? | ||
| Really early on with this research. | ||
| It's not just a matter of putting the stem cells into the damaged tissue. | ||
| The damaged tissue has to, number one, elaborate cytokines or cell signaling factors that say, hey, I'm damaged. | ||
| Come here and repair me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, after a tissue has been damaged long enough, it scars up and it's not sending out the signals. | ||
| It's asking for cellular repair. | ||
| Yeah, because it's come and gone. | ||
| It wasn't repaired. | ||
| Now it's just nothing but an old scar. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it has to have the signals to kind of wave the flag to signal the stem cells to come to repair it. | ||
| Now, once the stem cells are in place, the stem cells need other cofactors. | ||
| For example, one cofactor that they've recently reported in literature is IGF-1, which is what the body makes when you give it growth hormone that turns on certain cellular repair mechanisms and allows growth factor to work much more effectively. | ||
| So there are these cell repair factors, cell signaling factors, and other cofactors that work in conjunction with the stem cells themselves. | ||
| We're just now beginning to discover what they are. | ||
| And also, there are hundreds of different cell lines. | ||
| And so we may find that one cell line of stem cells works better for repairing nerve tissue than another cell line. | ||
| And we're only working as scientists, the entire medical community is only working with about 50 different stem cell lines right now when there are literally hundreds and probably, if you figure in, you know, variations in immunity, thousands. | ||
| So one very productive model might be inoculation, right? | ||
| In other words, if you determine it's a virus and there is a way to inoculate, then you might stop, I don't know, some high, great, high percentage of any kind of heart disease or heart attacks, that kind of thing? | ||
| Well, when we find, for example, if we were to find that heart disease was associated in large part with chlamydia infections, there's some chlamydia, which is a sexually transmitted disease, very common in the environment. | ||
| There's been reports that something like 60% of people with atherosclerotic plaques, when they take out the atherosclerotic plaques, they find chlamydia or other microorganisms within the plaque. | ||
| So it may be that these microorganisms find their way into the heart tissue and colonize there and again create this inflammatory cascade, this inflammatory process that leads ultimately to heart disease. | ||
| So inoculation against these particular bacteria may prevent heart disease altogether. | ||
| Now there's something else that's exciting and that's genetic engineering, which we didn't talk about, but we already have a specific genetic material that we can inject into hearts, and this is already being done in people that will actually grow new heart vessels. | ||
| Grow new heart vessels. | ||
| So you may be able to get your heart overhauled at age 50, and who cares whether you have atherosclerosis? | ||
| You'll just grow a new set of coronary arteries. | ||
| We seem on the absolute edge of so much. | ||
| So much. | ||
| Well, you are absolutely correct, Art. | ||
| This is a fantastic time to be alive. | ||
| And anti-aging really is that bridge, that biotechnological bridge to potential practical immortality. | ||
| And by that, I mean lifespans in excess of 100. | ||
| You know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, talking about living to be 100 was complete lunacy. | ||
| Nobody made it that long. | ||
| I mean, that was mythical, wasn't it? | ||
| It sort of still is. | ||
| I mean, they do make it. | ||
| We see them getting celebrated on network morning shows, 100, 100, 100. | ||
| So some people are making it. | ||
| Well, there's over 100,000 Americans now, age 100 and young. | ||
| Are there really 100,000? | ||
| Yeah, 100,000. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| 100,000 people, 100 or older. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So forget about 100, but let's look at people who are 90. | ||
| There are plenty of athletes who are still 90. | ||
| People who are running, who are fully functional, who are enjoying life to the fullest. | ||
| My mom's in her mid-80s. | ||
| My uncle is 85. | ||
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They have a full and complete life right now. | |
| 50 years ago, that was unheard of. | ||
| Well, then it could come very quickly. | ||
| Do you sort of wonder when the big blast will be? | ||
| I mean, when something really gigantic will get discovered? | ||
| I expect it any day. | ||
| Any day. | ||
| Any day. | ||
| Because all you need is one new drug or one great new discovery and you could one therapy that allows for DNA repair and you've changed the entire mechanism of human aging. | ||
| You've changed the risk factors for cancer, for many degenerative diseases of aging. | ||
| Do you believe that our society would be prepared right now to grapple with the implications of a discovery of that magnitude? | ||
| Well, I don't see, you know, I think society will handle whatever is thrown at it and whether, you know, it's not a question of are we ready for it. | ||
| I think the question is when it happens, people will adjust to it, just as we've adjusted to. | ||
| So many other things. | ||
| Doctor, we're out of time. | ||
| Oh, Art, it's always a pleasure. | ||
| It is indeed a pleasure. | ||
| Thanks a million for being here. | ||
| It's my favorite thing, Art, and that's why I want you to be part of the Ageless Society so we can do it for another hundred years. | ||
| Totally excellent night. | ||
|
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Thank you. | |
| Good night, Doctor. | ||
| Here is Crystal. | ||
| Peg is out here with exactly the right words from the high deserts. | ||
| Nightfall. | ||
|
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Midnight in the desert. | |
| Shooting stars across the sky. | ||
| This magical journey will take this dawn alive. | ||
| Filled with belonging, searching for the truth. | ||
| When we make it to tomorrow, the sun shines on you. |
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