Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
I speak with world leaders on circadian & quantum biology, metabolic medicine & regenerative farming in search of the most effective ways of optimising health and reversing chronic disease.
Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
89. Magnetic Fields, Mitochondria & Quantum Biology | Professors Geoffrey Guy & Alastair Nunn
World leading quantum biologists of the Guy Foundation join me to discuss the ground-breaking Space Health Report and its implications for human health and chronic disease on Planet Earth.
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Listen to my first episode with Prof Geoffrey Guy - https://youtu.be/deqhjqknFtU
Read the ful Space Health Report here - https://www.theguyfoundation.org/space-health/
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Effects of Magnetic Fields on Health
15:36 Radiation, Hormesis, and Mitochondria Interaction
31:04 Light and Biology Interaction in Cells
39:39 Impact of Light on Mitochondrial Health
47:12 Biological Implications of Space Travel
57:25 Impact of Space Environment on Health
1:08:41 Xenohormesis and Quantum Biology Discussion
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And now we're realizing, and certainly a lot of research is now showing, that indeed varying the magnetic field alters metabolism and generates reactive oxygen species, which of course gives a really neat insight into what may happen to astronauts as they go beyond the moon.
Speaker 2:In this episode of the Regenerative Health Podcast, I speak again with Professor Jeffrey Guy of the Guy Foundation. I'm also joined with his colleague, professor Alastair Nunn, who is one of the world-leading researchers in the field of quantum biology. Now, if you haven't yet seen my first episode with Professor Guy, check that out, as well as my previous episode discussing the Guy Foundation Space Health Report. Now onto the episode. We'd love to dive into a couple of topics in this episode. Probably the main one is the recent Space Health Report that was issued by the foundation. I guess the implications that that report has for health optimization, for chronic disease prevention and for essentially life life on earth. So so, so, maybe, um, maybe, let's start with how we start, how you guys started to think about health through a space lens I'll start off with that.
Speaker 3:Then Max, the Foundation runs twice a year five symposia series where we cover certain topics and a couple of years ago we were looking quite closely at spin, subtopic spin, and whereas gravity provides weight to mass, magnetic fields determine the spin of subtonic particles. And we were beginning to think about the molecular interactions if you alter spin and that may have effects on the outcomes of molecular interactions and it seemed particularly pertinent to components of the electron transport chain in the mitochondria. Now we don't have any epidemiological evidence of illnesses induced by change in magnetic fields or spin. There was some work looking at mobile phones and that sort of thing, but not in lower levels of magnetic fields, in hypomagnetic fields. So medicine hasn't really focused on that because there really weren't the patients and the pathologies coming forwards.
Speaker 3:But it suddenly struck us that there was an area that humans were going to be exploring where there were no magnetic fields and that is beyond the magnetosphere of the Earth.
Speaker 3:So travel to Mars, travel to the Moon, there's no magnetic fields next to no magnetic fields on the moon, almost none on Mars as well and none on the way. And it suddenly struck us that some of the pathologies that we were seeing in returning astronauts may well be attributed to these changes in metabolic circumstances and in mitochondrial function, and not only to the more conventional views of microgravity and radiation. And that's what spurred us to think about putting a half-day symposium together, which I think we did about a couple of years ago, didn't we? Alastair. It was a half-day symposium where we had some space scientists and started to explore this, and it seemed that it had been overlooked entirely in terms of space health. So we then decided we would produce a report and recruited about 30 top experts around the world as part of the working group, and it took us nearly two years to put the report together, and that's the report that was issued in October, and Alistair was the principal author, along with other colleagues.
Speaker 1:Well, what we found was very interesting and this is something we've found as we delved into the space health thing.
Speaker 1:Of course there's actually quite a lot out there that was already out there but wasn't really being talked about.
Speaker 1:And indeed when I started digging into the literature, we found there were actually people and these were space scientists saying 10 to 12 years ago, what about hypermagnetic fields? And of course nobody had really kind of followed up on this because certainly as far as NASA and certainly Roskomost and the other major space agencies, they're all looking at mainly gravity, the lack of gravity of course, and radiation, but these other things weren't really being appreciated. So that's kind of, and we realise now this is very important and the link here of course in certainly quantum biology is of course one of the big areas which kicked off. Quantum biology was the search for the mechanism behind how birds navigate and this linked into the magnetic fields and this idea of quantum spin. And now we're realizing, and certainly a lot of research is now showing, that indeed varying the magnetic field alters metabolism and generates reactive oxygen species, so which of course gives a really neat insight into what may happen to astronauts as they go beyond the moon there you go.
Speaker 1:You've gone quiet.
Speaker 2:Sorry, that's absolutely fascinating and something that us in mainstream medicine we're not even close to thinking about the effect of magnetic fields on mitochondrial physiology and reactive oxygen species.
Speaker 2:So I want to highlight, I think, the first part of the Space Health Report that you really illustrate a point and it becomes relevant for the rest of the report which is um the premise, which is that space flight is inducing what is what you you call an accelerated aging phenotype. Um, which I think that the layman can conceive is you go into space, beyond this, this goldilocks zone of, and you simply just age quicker and your mitochondria stop functioning as well. But you use a definition of optimal health that I'd like to read out, and it is optimal health is a phenotype that maximizes health span and fitness while demonstrating morbidity compression in relation to its species, maximum lifespan, and my translation of that for people was you know the organism or you are healthy for most of your life, remaining fit, functional and robust, with little evidence of disease until very close to you know your maximum lifespan and time of death. So maybe let's talk a little bit about that definition and how you guys came about it.
Speaker 1:Shall I go with that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this falls out of our thinking with Professor Jimmy Bell at Westminster, but really an interest we've always had, which is why? Is it that? It seems that a modern lifestyle seems to accelerate the ageing process, and certainly this is seen with the increasing rates of obesity. There's this thing called metabolic syndrome, which you may or may not have heard of, but it's associated with increased visceral fat, insulin resistance, diabetes and a whole number of other things. Certainly, medicine has been wandering around this definition for ages, but what we do know is that the metabolic syndrome certainly seems to be associated with an increase at a younger age of all sorts of diseases, and this is not just diabetes but cancer, alzheimer's and all sorts of things. And certainly this seems to suggest that, for whatever reason, people are beginning to age faster.
Speaker 1:And this led us to start thinking about what actually is health. And certainly, when we start to look into the data, what we actually see is that there's an average health life expectancy which we see from the whole planet. You know this is what average it all out, and that's between 80 to 85 expect life expectancy. But what we also see is potentially that you start getting ill around 65, 70. But what we also see, and this has been known for a long time if we live a healthy lifestyle so this is the Mediterranean lifestyle. We do lots of exercise, you know we don't be careful in the sun and everything. Perhaps some sun people can generally live a lot longer and the key thing is they live a lot longer and healthier and it all goes wrong at the end, as you say, you get this thing called morbidity compression. Is who? They live a lot longer and healthier and it all goes wrong. At the end, as you say, you get this thing called morbidity compression. But we also know, if you go the other way, you have a really bad last us or drink a lot, smoke a lot and get really fat. You've actually your life expectancy is far less and what we've seen, certainly within the literature and certainly within the research, is this actually is.
Speaker 1:Is has as an area which has been quite well investigated in terms of calorie restriction. I think you've probably heard of the idea of calorie restriction and certainly some of the pathways involved in this are very much involved in the ageing. So there seems to be something going on about how we control the ageing process using the environment. This is something we've got really interested in, and it seems to be that with time as we get older, our ability to adapt we get less and less robust. Seems to be that with time as we get older, our ability to adapt we get less and less robust. But fascinatingly, we now know that exercise, for instance, greatly reduces the rate that we age, and this seems to be an adaptation to stress.
Speaker 1:And so when we have our modern lifestyle, which is, we've got this potential not to move at all, we've got lots and lots of spare food. We don't need to go and get it. It seems that our systems just can't deal with it, and one of the key findings is that we A we get more inflamed, but B our mitochondrial function goes downhill and degenerates much faster. So of course, this tends to suggest that there is this kind of ageing. And of course, the problem with this is actually we still don't fully understand what ageing is and there's still no consensus exactly on what it is. And there are groups of scientists who think, well, actually with the right environment we can live forever, but, uh, the suggestion is very much that we can't. We actually do have seem to have a kind of programmed, uh, lifespan, but we can modify it using the environment and these alistair, when we've had meetings on aging.
Speaker 3:Um, we tend to focus not on people extending their lifespan, but actually remaining healthier longer, and that that's probably probably far more important. There's an enormous burden on all health care systems throughout the world now, with people spending the last decade of life in extreme, extremely, extremely poor health. Maybe useful also as to just think about and, max, to think about how we can describe aging, and in the report we talk really about the difference between biological age and chronological age, and this comes out of the work of people like Steve Horvath, who's looked at the epigenetic clock. But there's also proteomic ways in which one can age a subject or an organism biologically, as opposed to just their chronological age, and so one factor of aging is is your biological age much greater than your chronological age? And it would be very well useful to know that.
Speaker 3:About people going to space, you know how do they start off? Are they already starting off where their metabolic function seems to be older than they seem to appear? One from their outward physique as you know, astronauts are going to be fit as a fiddle and from their chronological age. This is something I think quite essential for us to begin to focus on. Not only does your biological age differ from your chronological age, but the biological age of different organs in your body different from one another, and I and this was the work I think steve orvath mapped out something like 234 or so animals to be able to sort this work out yeah, the interesting implication from this is actually the age you go into space, for instance, and how fit you are when you start could actually have quite an implication how well you do.
Speaker 1:I think most of us we always see the films and we know that well. We certainly know all astronauts tend to be extremely fit, usually younger and highly intelligent. Then they come back and say, yeah, we're fine, but actually you know what is actually going on and it says the data seems to point otherwise.
Speaker 3:So there is I'm very much back to here if we went back so about 16 years or so, we published a paper to do with um, metabolic syndrome in the gulf. And you know, in the Arabian Gulf diabetes has increased enormously from 1% or 2% 40, 50 years ago to nearly 30% within the population. It was very important for us to focus on what might be going on there and we came to the conclusion that metabolic syndrome was really accelerated aging, so diabetes was accelerated aging. Then we fast forward to the COVID era where again we wrote about the mitochondrial implication of some of the COVID symptoms and the sequelae from COVID. Again, those people that succumbed that seemed to be otherwise fit. It was determined in a number of cases that they had mitochondrial dysfunction. So really what we need to do is understand what's going on at a mitochondrial level before someone is exposed to these stresses and in space there are a lot of them as they're exposed and what happens when they come back.
Speaker 2:And I think that's the main thrust of the report and we can talk about what we think those stresses are and the ones that have probably been overlooked essentially and, alistair, I think you could probably address those- yeah, absolutely, and we will go through the different stresses that are present in exposure to, to space and with regard to aging and and you brought up the metabolic syndrome, and yes, I'm, I'm very familiar with that and I I think it is.
Speaker 2:What you've described is a very elegant way of um posing the problem, which is how do we, as much as possible, optimize this idea of healthspan and stop people ending up in a nursing home from the age of 65 until their eventual death at 80.
Speaker 2:The two concepts I want to bring up and I think they're really relevant one of them is mitochondrial heteroplasmy, which I know professor doug wallace has talked about in your uh, your various series and, and to me that seems to make the most sense as to explain or underlie um, the, the accumulation of.
Speaker 2:Well, it literally it refers to the accumulation of mitochondrial dna mutations that therefore affect the accumulation of mitochondrial DNA mutations that therefore affect the mitochondrial function and accumulate it over time. And then you essentially get a brownout, which I describe it as a power brownout, where the lights are dimming so that the energy output of the cell goes down and therefore its ability to operate, whether that's a heart cell or a neuron or a cell in the kidney, that's, a heart cell or neuron or a cell in the kidney, so leading to eventual organ failure perhaps, and then aging and death. And the other concept that is relevant, especially with regard to space flight, is hormesis and the fact that a little bit of a stressor is useful. But perhaps if we're exposed 24 seven to a stressor that is unable to be have a hormetic benefit because it's simply unending or constant, yeah, I mean, which one do you want to start with?
Speaker 1:I mean the second one. The hormesis is actually really interesting because in terms of radiation, this is something which is turning out to be very, very badly understood, and that is that most of the radiobiology we've done has been acute in terms of treating for cancer and things. But actually when you get into space you've got a low dose, but for a very long time, but it's two or three hundred fold higher than we normally experience on Earth. I mean, on the standard exposure you and I get on Earth is between what is something like two to three milliservents a day, but the average astronaut sorry, two minute yeah, is getting something like 10 or more or 20 or 30 or more, and so the cumulative dose sorry, it's two or three milliservants a year.
Speaker 1:I get that wrong, but astronauts are getting that per day. So it's two to three hundred times more than they would be exposed to on Earth. But of course, the interesting thing here is that we haven't been able until quite recently to study a particular what they call gcr galactic cosmic radiation, and this is high energy, uh, let uh in the energy transfer particles. And this seems to be actually the main problem they're now suffering is that, how do we, how do we control for this? How can we shield against it? And and what happens in biology when you're just exposed to that level for that long? And the answer is I don't think anybody really knows, although there are some preliminary studies indicating that if you give the same dose of radiation over a short period versus a long period, you can get quite different effects. So that's a very good question and certainly it does fall out of this. You know, does a cell have the ability to adapt for a couple of days, but when you do it for 10 months, it just runs out of steam. You can't do it.
Speaker 2:Alistair, can you break down for us the difference between the high-let and the low-let?
Speaker 1:radiation I mean low-let radiation is low-energy ionizing radiation. This potentially is things like gamma rays. Ionizing radiation this potentially is things like gamma rays. But high energy is and this is more to do with actual nuclei, heavy nuclei things like carbon and iron, which come from exploding nebulae and things, and they carry thousands of times more energy than a gamma ray and they tend to scatter in a very different way than the way gamma rays do, and so they can impart a lot more energy to the system.
Speaker 1:And I think one of the key things they're now realising, of course as I think certainly the original research on radiation was all about DNA damage and do we get mutation and cancer. But they're now realising, of course, certainly with this GCR, this high energy radiation, it damages everything in the cell, including your mitochondria, and the problem with that is and this is something we've suggested in the report is that of course this goes on top of reducing ability of mitochondrial, reducing mitochondrial function. And mitochondria and it's not everybody realizes are essential to how you maintain your genome, your DNA, because they provide a lot of the antioxidants and the molecules which keep the DNA intact. So if they're getting damaged, everything then goes downhill quite quickly and you can't repair your DNA, so the chances of something going wrong increase dramatically.
Speaker 3:And also as mitochondrial function fails. Then you have the link with melatonin production and loss of circadian rhythm All of it.
Speaker 1:That's a whole other area to discuss.
Speaker 3:Of course, and in terms of mitochondrial DNA mutations, we've spent some time with the cancer researchers here in the UK and now they're able to identify, for a whole range of cancers now, mitochondrial DNA mutations. So this heteroplasmia is not only leading towards poor function, but perhaps some early and acute abnormal function.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, the cancer link is a really interesting one because it's predominantly thought as being, you know, nuclear DNA. But they're now realising there's a lot more to do with mitochondrial dysfunction or changing function, which actually is a very old idea, goes back to the Warburg hypothesis 30 or 40 years ago. But actually people thought, oh well, that's just secondary. But what we actually think is happening now, these mitochondria changing function and this is an evolutionary adaptation to accelerate help the cancer grow, and so the whole field is changing direction now and we have to start thinking the entire cell has been completely integrated. So trying to silo out or just a DNA change in the nucleus, or just a DNA change the mitochondria, isn't good enough anymore. And especially if you start to damage other components of the cell, like the cytoskeleton, which of course something doesn't everybody thinks about. But we know GCR can damage any other component, big molecules you think about the size of proteins in cells and particularly your cytoskeleton. Damage to that you know it doesn't do, you know, know, doesn't really help at all.
Speaker 1:And in terms of the rat, in terms of the heteroplasmy, yes, this is, I think, still a slightly misunderstood area, but certainly I think the person to speak to is doug bollis on that, because he's an absolute expert on it. But you're right. But not all heteroplasmy is bad. Some is good, but what? What is not understood is why sometimes it leads to a malfunction. And again this could be due to just natural selection, in the end, that a particular mitochondria does better but it doesn't do it much good for the rest of the cell, and so you know so there's a whole area.
Speaker 3:We have to distinguish between malfunction and dysfunction, because quite often when we talk about mitochondrial dysfunction, actually the mitochondria functioning perfectly well, it's just the net outcome of that is just not very healthy for the cell yeah, I mean, I think this is where the origins of life idea that we, we, we often refer back to the origins of life.
Speaker 1:And of course, if you look at the some of some of the theories on the origins of life, in particular those around thermal vents, the argument is that actually life started by a flow of hydrogen going into acidic seawater and that explains what we see in the mitochondria as the proton gradient. But in modern mitochondria we always see it as electrons driving the proton gradient. But in early life and then the thermal vent, it was the other way around. And certainly the biochemistry mitochondria. They have this merry-go-round of the thing called the krebs cycle. They can operate in many different directions and people now realize of course oh, this doesn't make, it's not quite as simple. So mitochondria can go into what they call biosynthetic mode and just operate in a completely different direction. They're not dysfunctional at all, they're just doing what the cell wants. So and so that's back to the point jeff making.
Speaker 3:And if that happens, Having made your point on hormesis and radiation, I think there was some studies and some notions that in the increasing circumference around the two atomic bombs in Japan, when they got to a certain distance further out, there was some evidence that in fact there was improved health and lifespan in in the population, suggesting that very small stimuli of radiation can prompt improved cellular and improved organ. That is a function.
Speaker 1:This this is, as I'm sure you're aware, max, is a very loaded area because around this time there was a lot of interest. This go back to the 30s and 40s. They were trying to understand how mutation happened and one of the theories was that it was just down to radiation background radiation and I don't want to go into too much detail, but there's a professor, ed Calabrese, talks about this a great deal. I'm sure you may have heard of him this idea that everybody thought for a while any radiation was bad, but actually it became true that actually that is not the case at all and indeed people are now using radiation very low doses of radiation, for instance, to suppress inflammation in COVID and other diseases. Radiation, for instance, to suppress inflammation in COVID and other diseases.
Speaker 1:So and actually looking at the molecular mechanisms of this, this makes perfect sense because they have similarities to other stressors like, for instance, polyphenols, or even exercise, and things activate some of the same pathways in the cell. So it's a real thing. But I think the interesting thing here is, of course, what we're exposed to on Earth, as you said, is a very low level of radiation, because it's two, three, two or three, four hundred fold increased in space. And back to your earlier point about the dose and the timing. Can that you know? Do we understand what's going to happen in biology? My suspicion is that biology's never been here before, so it doesn't know how to handle it, and the natural consequence of that is it starts going wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I've heard similar things about the radiology profession, which is some data suggests that radiologists, potentially nuclear medicine physicians, are actually having a hormetic benefit from their low-level exposures, occupational exposures.
Speaker 2:So I mean, that makes sense to me. And I guess getting to the heart of hormesis is this low-dose stressor is upregulating antioxidant pathways and other pathways that are, yeah, the compensatory mechanism is having a net benefit effect. You mentioned sun at the beginning, really in passing, but I think that's a really good example of a hormetic stressor, which is solar and UV light and the fact that when we are exposed to UVA and UVB light on planet Earth, yes, uvb can cause DNA strand breaks and these CPD products and, yes, uva can cause DNA damage through oxidative stress. But it also is the fact that UVB produces these vitamin D secosteroid compounds that upregulate basic scission repair to essentially correct the damage that was done. And it's your countryman, professor Richard Weller, who's done the epidemiology on on sunlight exposure and all-course mortality, and there's no data that that shows that more uv light exposure actually leads to reduced mortality. In fact, the opposite so, and that that's another aspect to this, this, uh, radiation story.
Speaker 1:Well, that's this this shows how, for instance, we focus on one thing, we can miss the miss the big picture, and certainly everybody. For instance, we focus on one thing, we can miss the big picture, and certainly everybody. For instance, there's a study, very famous study, done in Scandinavia, where they looked at mortality and light exposure and what they indeed found was that people outside more tended to live quite a longer and more health. Yes, they had more melanoma, but they were healthier. Exactly to your point that we got so focused on one thing, we missed the other obvious thing is that UV light can be actually doing something beneficial. This goes back to the study when I was working at Harwell.
Speaker 1:We were using UV light to image mitochondria. Now they can do this because they contain this compound called NADH. This absorbs a photon of UV light and then produces a longer wavelength which we can see as fluorescence, autofluorescence. But it also can inject an electron. But what you see is a very clear biphasic effect. So very low dose. The cell gets slightly stressed and goes oh we've got more reactive oxygen than we need, so let's upregulate and defend against it, and off we go. But of course, most of experiments are done with very high levels of UV, which just blow the cell to pieces. But of course we haven't looked at those low levels, so of course this is hormesis 101. What's it?
Speaker 2:The fact that this NADH compound is essentially absorbing light in the UV range and UV is short wavelength, so solar UV isn't actually penetrating the body very far at all. So, I'm guessing that the corollary here is that the UV chromophore capability of this compound is adapted to receiving endogenously generated UV light from what I'm presuming are bio photons.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, yeah, absolutely. But we actually made a suggestion in one of our papers and I haven't really been picked up that you could have made the argument that actually, at the right dose and level, nadh is actually a sunscreen because it absorbs the energy and redistributes it. So people always think of it as just being because it's one of the key electron carrying molecules in the body and airborne proton carriers, but it is often doing it under UV light. But it also acts as a sunblock.
Speaker 3:As do many of the components of the cell, which probably protect you. The early life started where there was extreme UV in the atmosphere coming down on us because there wasn't much in the way of atmosphere, and I suspect these molecules were acting to block the effects of UV on DNA, because DNA is also sacrificial in terms of protecting itself against UV.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I mean DNA is a good sunblock. I mean bacteria do it. They release these nets of DNA and this, of course, this goes back to another slightly offside question. But of course one of the areas which is really interesting is what cell death is. Now I'm sure you come across this process of apoptosis.
Speaker 1:I used to work on this when I was a young postdoc, but of course it came as a bit of a revelation at the time, because even this process was going on, this idea of cell suicide, because nobody could explain, for instance, how the immune system worked. They then discovered, of course, trillions of cells were killing themselves, but they were doing it in such a way that they were then removed very tidily with no evidence of it. But it surprises a lot of people to know that bacteria and archaea, the prokaryotes, also undergo apoptosis. They have a form of cell death. So death is very, very, very old indeed. But one of the mechanisms is, for instance, as Jeffrey says, in biofilms if they're exposed to a lot of light, a lot of the cells will die, but they release the DNA and that DNA actually blocks the sun. So there's more than one thing going on here which is really quite fascinating.
Speaker 3:Going back to your point about penetration, I know you had Bob Fosbury on one of your podcasts a very successful one, of course, and we work closely with Bob. The UV light and the blue light are subject to first-order scatter and really get not very far into the tissues at all, whereas the higher order, the red light, infrared, will pass well through the tissues and deeply into the body.
Speaker 1:Well, there's actually I mean, you may not be aware of this, but there's just been a paper published where they think they they found a new mechanism of how blue light induces reactive oxygen, and it seems that what's and there's again it probably needs to be reduced. But what they've shown is that light at around 450 nanometers which is blue, which is a very important wavelength seems to be absorbed by a like a super molecule mixture of oxygen and a tryptophan, which is an amino acid inside proteins, and they call it confined oxygen. This seems to generate ROS, because if this is true, it means all a lot of proteins where this could be happening, especially in high oxygen levels, could start generating and get damaged. And so, if this is true and again it needs to be repeated but it suggests that all proteins under UV light, or blue light in particular, could potentially be damaged, and this is an absolutely fascinating finding. But of course, it changes the way we view reactive oxygen, because I'm sure you're aware that reactive oxygen isn't just a byproduct. It's an incredibly important cellular signal. Cells rely on what they call redox, which is a contraction of redox, reduction and oxidation.
Speaker 1:And if this is true, it also means that we may not be able to see what's going on inside some of these proteins and, of course, the mechanisms we look at the moment in biology to study a reactive oxygen production very, very primitive, very blunt.
Speaker 1:We can't really see what's going on. This is one of the big problems. We have a lot of this research. At the moment we simply don't have methods for looking exactly where the reactive oxygen is in a cell. But if you've got this mechanism, it suggests there's a far more sensitive mechanism in the cell for detecting this and indeed you could start to argue that low doses this would prevent the proteins, for instance, from folding, which is a lot of proteins in the body when they're made don't fold properly and they have to get removed and they're disposed of very quickly. But there's a very, very good mechanism for recognising and removing them and if this process is upregulated it clears out the cell and at the right level it's quite beneficial. So there's a whole area here we don't you know. We've only just been able to open the box on and have a look at.
Speaker 2:A couple of points there and I quickly want to revisit this idea of cellular sunscreens. I think semantics matters and I think the use of the term non-visual photoreceptor could also be applied in this situation. And then, because I mean traditionally the idea of non-visual photoreceptor could also be applied in this situation. And, and then so because I mean traditionally the idea of non-visual photoreceptors, are these um chromophore proteins that are like melanopsin, encephalopsin, neuropson, that are essentially absorbing light and therefore, and then triggering a enzymatic cascade like that involves um entrainment of perhaps local circadian rhythms in the cell or or more globally. But but the other point is that you know cholesterol, cholesterol is absorbing uvb light and that is triggering that. This, this uh um vitamin d cascade and but. But what you're talking about as well is that dna is, is a chromophore for uv light. Dna is absorbing ultraet light and now NADH. I mean, that is another way of thinking. Perhaps this is also a non-visual photoreceptor and it is some enzymatic cascade that is extremely important for the cell.
Speaker 1:Well, this takes us back to the origins of life again, because when you look at these, you talk about these bigger molecules that absorb light receptors, but they're all based around a fundamental chromophore and this is often FAD or NAD and others very small and iron sulfides. These are very small and these molecules would have existed right at the beginning of life. What you see as a modern protein is a huge molecule which has evolved and got more and more complicated, but it surrounds or is involved with a much more fundamental piece of chemistry or photochemistry type molecule, an FAD. This is kind of one of the molecules in the electron transport. Again, it's fundamental to a lot of these reactions. So when you start going back through time you can see how these things are built up. You know, at the moment we see massive complexity, massive complexity, but if you drill down and go back in time you see a much greater simplicity, which in particular, is around controlling electron and proton transport.
Speaker 2:And look at the you mentioned cytochrome, cytochrome 4, cytochrome C oxidase. I mean, I believe that's built on some copper centres. Yes, that's right yeah, the photochromes.
Speaker 1:I mean that's one of the theories about um, how red light's working, because it does absorb in the red red region near infrared region. But of course every site, every, every component of the electron transport chain, uh absorbs at a different wavelength. And this, interestingly, it goes from the top. Say, complex one is near a 450, through a way down to 340, actually with an nf. But as you go up, go up to the other end of the complex, down towards cytochrome C, it's at a much longer wavelength and I find that fascinating because it suggests a cascade of energy.
Speaker 3:It's actually an electron transport chain could be considered as a photon transport chain. Yeah, it's a photon, yeah, Absorbing at one wavelength, emitting at another, which is then absorbed all the way down.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the next. The key point I think to be emphasised in this light and biology story is this distinction between these solar photons, photons of solar origin, and photons endogenously generated photons. Because to me and I raised this when we talked, jeffrey, in our first podcast, and it was a big theme of my first podcast with Dr Jack Cruz, which is this is a story. Life and light story is one of solar light and solar photons interacting with our biology and then our biology generating light, but also re-emitting light that we're absorbing externally. That's how I think about it at the moment. Would you think that's correct or what are your thoughts?
Speaker 3:uh um well, we need to think about uh bio photons as well, not yeah, well, I mean, there's, there's, I mean I think that there is again.
Speaker 1:There's a very interesting thing which would, which touches on something we mentioned in the report, and this comes back to again the origins of life, but it also a definition of life and what life actually is. Now you I guess you're are you aware of the, the idea that life is basically a far from equilibrium, a self-organizing, dissipating structure. But if you think about it from that perspective, it starts to become very, very interesting, because you start to see all these cascades. And you mentioned cholesterol. But of course, what happens when you shine light on cholesterol? You go through a whole photochemistry which dissipates the energy and you end up with vitamin D. Was that process right at the beginning, simply a cholesterol-like molecule being a sunblock? But as the chemistry progressed, with the increasing the energy, of course that became part of the biological signaling mechanism. And so you can see how all of these pathways and the same as the calocrinin pathway in the brain, or what you see as the, the inflammatory pathway that again follows, and same with melatonin, they, they're all chemistry, it's basic chemistry going down through like energy levels and following the energy energy gradient, and they're all. They're basically dissipating the energy.
Speaker 1:So when you come back to the idea there's been this idea for a long time that life exists to dissipate the solar potential, so you get high energy photons coming in from the sun, but life has then evolved to dissipate that down to low energy, so therefore fulfilling entropy and thermodynamics. But of course, that's not the only source of light I've got too much time to go in this but there's certainly other sources of light, like in thermal vents. They glow in the infrared, so there's energy in other places other than just the sun, which is another fascinating topic in and of itself. Indeed, some of these ideas suggest that's how photosynthesis actually started. It didn't start with solar light, it started with thermal vent light. Wow, we don't know. We don't know, but there's interesting chemistry in there. You know, life begets its own origins and I and I think this, this is certainly something which you know is we're fascinated with. I'm certainly trying to look into at the moment how this, you know, fits in with all this but you're right, it's all about space travel max yeah, I want to.
Speaker 2:I want to bring it back to the second point that you made about blue light, and it is relevant for space travel, because the lighting situation in the International Space Station although I believe that they're trying to make some steps to correct it has been historically predominated by a visible only LED lighting situation, situation such as we find ourselves thanks to uh very ill, ill-informed governmental policies, um, we find ourselves collectively sitting under uh here on earth. So, if what, what? What you? What you mentioned earlier with regard to the talks, the, the implications of blue light um being absorbed by this tryptophan protein complex and generating massive reaction oxygen species. That, to me, could potentially explain part of the reason why existing in a blue only visible situation for 18 hours a day or longer is contributing to human disease and perhaps the metabolic syndrome and the deleterious metabolic outcomes that you get in that life.
Speaker 3:You have to think about the balance of the blue and the red. Yes, if these mechanisms create too much blue of itself may have detrimental effect, but there would normally be balancing mechanisms within within the cell. In the presence of red light, and throughout the day, the blue red levels are are changing and over half of the photons that that, that with which we're irradiated from the sun we can't see. Uh, yeah, so this is half the light going into the eye doesn't come to go through the pupil. It, uh, it just goes straight through the sclera and it's in the 900 to what? Two thousand nanometer range.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean this is a balance. That's because you you interviewed bob fosby, didn't you? And he interested with bob fosby about this and scotsman too yeah yeah, and so if 70% of the light coming from the sun is actually red or in thread when we go indoors and exactly the point you make it's suddenly all blue light. And this is, I think, that you know this idea. If you go into a hospital, for instance, it's the worst place to be because it's completely the wrong light spectrum well.
Speaker 3:Plus, they have double glazing to insulate the to the heat in, but that stops all the red light coming in, so you become red-starved and too much blue. And I think in the space station I think Max they changed the lighting in 2012, possibly from some more incandescent form to the LEDs.
Speaker 2:They did the same on British submarines as well, and I think we're reporting the same sort of pattern of of quite you know well submariners, uh, when they resurface after 70 or 80 days underwater so so the way I'm thinking about um this, as it relates to mitochondrial health and, and you know you, you we've observed that these astronauts are coming back pre-diabetic or insulin resistant and and that is a that must be a that's a pretty big deal, considering these are the fittest athletes that you know the world is, is is sending up, and they're coming back pre-diet, pre-diabetic. So, um, I would urge caution.
Speaker 1:It's not always, they're not always that bad, it's more subtle. I think, and I think this is being part of the problem is that many I mean I'd be interested to see how this couple are stuck up on the space station moment come back. They don't look very well at all. But, um, I think the I think very fit people will probably be able to manage this and I suspect they may have metabolic changes, indeed as, as you know, they quite clearly have mitochondrial changes which would suggest they're going down that path. But I think the real issue here is what happens with older people who are less fit when they go up.
Speaker 3:And if they come back with accelerated aging. So they're not pre-diabetic in themselves because they're still very, very fit. But if these changes remain for a number of years and some of them have been seen to last about seven years or so then they last for a number of years as these people get older and less fit and then they get intervening or attending pathologies when they call upon their mitochondria to provide better homeostasis. They've lost mitochondrial flexibility, so the problem is delayed. It's like long COVID. I suggest that we haven't seen long COVID yet. We'll see that in 10 to 20 years' time when 60-year-olds have the mitochondria of an 80-year-old.
Speaker 3:And so I think it's why it's really important that we have to get a measure of biological age in terms of metabolic terms, so we can look at the epigenetic clock, we can look at proteomics to, because otherwise somebody could come back with their metabolic age really accelerated. But they're effectively going from the age of 30 to the age of 50. You won't notice any difference until another 20 years down the line. I think that's something we need to think about. But also that's from returning from the International Space Station low Earth orbit that actually sits in the Earth's magnetosphere. What we don't have any experience of? Is humans spending any length of time, any reasonable length of time, outside, say on the moon's surface for months at the end, or the eight months it takes to get to Mars, or when you get to Mars, and that extended hypomagnetic environment, from our view and from the research we've commenced already, may cause extremely severe illness amongst these astronauts, severe illness amongst these astronauts.
Speaker 1:I mean because you know the last Artemis 1 mission which went around the moon and they measured radiation going around there and what was interesting, they showed that as the capsule left Earth's orbit it went through the two belts, which was predominantly a proton belt and an electron belt, and that increased the amount of radiation that it would drop off.
Speaker 1:But as it went around the moon they were exposed to a much greater level of GCR and indeed, just orbiting the moon, by far the greatest radiation dose came from the GCR and interestingly they had problem shielding against that, whereas the others the protons and the electron fields they could shield against, but not so much the GCR. And of course this raises a really interesting question because, as Geoffrey says, we haven't done a simple experiment yet which is to put, say, a colony of mice in orbit around the moon for two years to see what happens to them. We just don't have that longevity data. You know, what we've got is the only moon mission is actually, didn't they go to solar minimum? And it was when the moon was actually in the Earth's magnetic field.
Speaker 3:Briefly, that's why they chose the timing very, very carefully. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So we've got no data, we just don't have it. There's some modeling going on there, but we just don't have the real data, and I find this quite extraordinary.
Speaker 3:Are we to expect, possibly, as people explore way past low Earth orbit so that's past 1,500 miles or so and spend one, two, three months in open space or on the surface of the moon or Mars, if they get there, are we to expect to see something like an ultra-severe, long COVID phenotype where, effectively, mitochondrial function is literally down to basic survival level and ATP-ROS ratios will be off the scale and all the other sequelae of that, both in terms of loss of homeostasis, loss of adaptation?
Speaker 3:What we have to worry about more is not the chronic effects of what we see of exposure at low Earth orbit, but what might be the acute, so the immediate, early and delayed effects of going beyond the magnetosphere. I think nobody knows that We've started experiments at Westminster and Harwell with hypomagnetic chambers putting mitochondria and other uh organelles and cells in, and we're, you know, beginning to see what you know the, the profiles of, of what we might expect, and some of that data will get published in, certainly in june course the because, sorry, going on no I'm just going to say I mean one of the things that we were kind of making a point of and just that we are hopefully getting a paper.
Speaker 1:We submitted a paper talking about this, but actually it's about one of the ways to look at a lack of gravity, of course, is you lose the stimulus for mitochondrial function and of course you're then sending people off for seven or eight months with a degrading mitochondrial function simply because they're not being stimulated. And I think one of the key things here is and we're not alone in thinking this it's quite possible that you will never be able to do enough exercise in zero gravity to offset the lack of gravity, and our systems require that 1G and exercise to function properly. Take away the 1G and we're going to find all sorts of problems, which of course raises the question about will we get enough gravity on the moon or will there be enough gravity on Mars to offset some of these problems?
Speaker 3:Well, the moon is only 1 sixth G and there isn't enough.
Speaker 1:This comes back to the hormesis idea that we would be evolved at 1g. We require because gravity is a very powerful hormone what they call a hormetic, and certainly have done experiments with hypergravity, where you spin people around, you know slightly more and they certainly get benefits, and there's been, it's been, investigated as whether or not you could use that as a preconditioning mechanism before you send people into space. You know, you, you spin them around at 2g for three weeks and they can survive a bit longer without having to do that in gravity. But I think you know there are things here we don't understand.
Speaker 3:At a cytoskeleton point of view. Alistair and we were talking in our report about super radiance and microtubules. Then it might be worth talking, max, about tensegrity, so gravity and inertia, and how that might affect the cytoskeleton and might affect quantum function within mitochondria.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean to the point. I think, if you've heard, one of the key points we made was that you know, when you look at the lack of gravity, you know everything's evolved under 1G. And you know when you look at the lack of gravity, you know everything's evolved under one G. And of course, in every cell, and including in prokaryotes, which have a very, very primitive, some of the very primitive cytoskeletons, and certainly in complex organisms like us, you know what you carry out, to where we have mitochondria, mitochondrial function is completely integrated with the cytoskeleton and so as soon as you unload it, the system is stressed, because it's not used to that, but on an everyday process, of course, this is important how cells detect, for instance, the movement of other cells or stress, or even when you jump up and down. And the same thing happens with plants, although they have some quite interesting stress detection systems and, as it turns out, because they all think about mechanotransduction as the mechanism for gravity, sensing how plants and animals sense gravitation. But actually it seems to be more sensitive than people realise.
Speaker 1:And if this is the case, for instance, there's arguments that the organisms can attack lunar cycles through gravitational changes. And if this is true, what is the mechanism? This goes back to the circadian idea you were talking about, but in terms of the lack of gravity, yeah, you unstress a cell and suddenly, as Geoffrey, there's this concept called tension-induced integrity, and any architect will explain to you. It's like the keystone and the arch. You require the gravity to push the whole thing down, to give it structure, and we're just the same and we can survive without it. But the whole system suddenly unstressed, and inside your cells, the whole of the sky's skeletons is changing and that gives a very powerful and generally is associated with a generation of reactive oxygen species.
Speaker 3:And so, as there seems, steve thorne's group say, the gravitational field in which we have evolved and we live is oscillating all the time because of the relative movements of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon.
Speaker 1:We circle because we've got the Moon, but the Earth actually circles around what they call a barrio center, which is the Earth, lunar central gravity, which means there is a wobble, and certainly there's.
Speaker 1:Steve Thorne, who we know was working for the Copernican project, is suggesting well, could this be important Because, of course, within your nucleus you have a very heavy? Well, your nucleus of an atom is very heavy, but the electrons around the outside are very light, and so does that mean that they want the entire atom wobbles a bit more than the outside are very light, and so does that mean that they want the entire of the atom wobbles a bit more than the outside? And if it does that, of course that changes all the electrostatic interactions and potentially alters it how it reacts to a magnetic field. The answer we don't know, but of course there is other ways of explaining this. But certainly this idea that organisms can detect gravitational shifts very sensitive, million times less than they normally would, does suggest something really quite interesting. So of course, as soon as you remove that or change the circadian rhythm, you are altering this entrainment with the circadian clock again, which could be a problem for somebody circulating around the Earth 16 times a day, which is why this is rather complex.
Speaker 3:People said why don't you just strap a magnet to the outside of a spaceship? But it's far more complex than that, that the gravitational fields are oscillating, the magnetic fields have to be right and as you proceed out in space, we suspect there's going to be an extremely complex algorithm to try and reproduce, if possible, the Goldilocks zone in which we have evolved for the last billion years or so. And unless we can reproduce that zone appropriately and understand what the physical stresses are, as opposed to the biochemical or the physiological stresses are, unless we understand what those stresses are and how they impinge on mitochondrial function or on all other cellular function, it's going to be difficult to provide an environment where humans can maintain their adaptability. As they move out Now, the humans will have difficulty.
Speaker 3:The other issue to think about is that the single-cell organisms, prokaryotes and small eukaryotes, may adapt far more quickly because of their you know their cycle and uh, that would then have a an impact on the host, host, um, microbiome interaction. And as we also know that, uh, a little while ago nasa announced they had found 18 mutations of bacteria on the space station which don't exist on earth. So the on the space station which don't exist on earth. So the, the microbiome which forms the majority of the cells that you're looking at it's about 53 percent of us will probably adapt far more quickly than a complex organism like like like humans. Then if you've got a mismatch between the microbiome trying to adapt and the Hume's to adapt, there'll be all sorts of downstream issues to consider in terms of human health and the way in which we interact with and rely very heavily on our microbiome.
Speaker 2:Yes, the implications are incredible and if you will let me I'll summarize quickly. It seems like spaceflight is associated with this accelerated aging phenotype and that is equivalent, so to speak, to mitochondrial dysfunction or impairments in mitochondrial function. And the exposures that we're looking at here are zero gravity or a loss of gravity and the tensegrity that is helping keep structure in the cell and the mitochondria. We're talking about radiation exposures that we don't get on planet Earth, which include this high LET, which are these helium nuclei and other kind of solar essentially nuclei and high-energy particles, and then the low-LET, which is the gamma rays and X-rays, and we haven't even mentioned things like radio frequency and, potentially, radiation that man-made emitted, and that's a discussion for another podcast.
Speaker 2:But it seems like that form of non-native EMF is having severe, well consequential biological effects.
Speaker 2:And then we've got the loss of near-native emf, is is having severe consequential biological effects.
Speaker 2:And then we've got the loss of near-infrared radiation which, as you mentioned alistair, is making up um more than half of the solar photons that we irradiated on on planet earth. And and what the consequences that are having for mitochondrial physiology the atpa spinning if we're suddenly in a near-infrared dark area, the loss of circadian environmental cues from visible only lighting, from this absence of perhaps true darkness and the other kind of space station light exposures, and then finally, the loss of the magnetic field, which you've eloquently informed us that it's likely that we're sensitive to the orbiting of the moon around the planet Earth. So to me this seems like an absolutely quixotic endeavor to really allow humans to go beyond this environment that we've lived in for the past three billion years, iteratively growing from single cellular organisms. There's no way in my mind that we are going to recreate these conditions to allow people to survive or thrive at all in this environment. And in my mind it seems like any astronaut that signs up to go to Mars or the moon has to sign a piece of paper acknowledging that they're prepared to get cancer at the age of 50, to get diabetes at the age of 40 and perhaps um, because of the mitochondrial stresses that are going to be involved I, I mean I, I think that's interesting, I mean that's that's, that's true.
Speaker 1:but I think I I was talking to somebody who's um is a scientist and then he's been specializing in building centrifuges. Uh, last week, and the evidence is that if you could and you've seen all the science fiction films, you know the martian they all have they will have rotating space stations and the truth is that probably is the solution, certainly for a large chunk of at least getting the gravity back, and this has lots more effects than simply enhancing a mitochondrial function. But he was making the point that actually is it really that expensive to do? Certainly they put experiments on the space station now where they've actually had small mini centrifuges and they put things like fruit flies and cells in there and they've shown quite clearly that having the mini centrifuge greatly improves the health of those cells or fruit flies, and I'm sure there are I know there are other experiments they're looking at at the moment.
Speaker 1:So the question is we can probably go some of the way to offsetting that? We can certainly. For instance, if we could build a centrifuge in space, we could certainly, for instance, get the light right. That's certainly something we could sort out fairly easily. Um, the other factor which, of course and this only came out quite recently and it's probably well known, but I didn't realise that on the space station they run at a lower oxygen level, but they also apparently run at a slightly higher carbon dioxide level. Now, of course, any biochemist will tell you straight away that that can start to trigger off hypoxic mechanisms in cells. There's this thing called a hypoxia inducer factor, hif1. But this is very sensitive to ROS and if this is the case, you're automatically pushing metabolism in a certain direction, towards glycolysis, which is fine for a little bit. But what's going to happen for three years? And again, this is another whammy on the mitochondria, because you're asking it to do something else, but the body wants it to do something else, which is not necessarily that.
Speaker 2:And so is this another factor which I mean.
Speaker 1:again, I don't know the actual figures and I'm afraid I'll have to find out, but if this is indeed the case, this is a very subtle, yet other shift that we need to sort out. But again, it's probably not impossible. But the reason they reduce oxygen, obviously, is for safety reasons, as we discovered in the Gemini mission, the early Apollo series well, the Gemini Apollo. But the case about this, of course, it is yet something else which has changed.
Speaker 3:What I think we have to be very careful, though, max, is when we've looked at this over the last couple of years, we've become more and more concerned not only about the long-term health but also the short-term survivability in these circumstances, of which very little is understood. And there are some potential mitigations. But before we can think about mitigations, what we really need to do is do a couple of things. One is establish whether this thinking represents a real phenotype, a real phenomenon. If it does, how can we characterize it, what is the impact of it and what mitigations might be made. And to what extent will those mitigations be acceptable in due course? And that will then ask questions of whether, whether man is in fact actually trapped trapped on Earth. But there are some mitigations, for example, in the space, associated neuroocular syndrome. There's a couple of papers recently on using near infrared or infrared light to try and reduce those. So we could see a combination of reintroducing some gravitational effect with it, with it, with it with a centrifuge, balancing blue and red light appropriate times during the day and make sure there's plenty of uh, uh of infrared light and uh and, and providing some sort of magnetic um environment. And now that might not be in the whole spaceship? It might be, you know, people wearing suits which irradiate them with a little bit red light and provide us a local magnetic field or whatever. But the complexity of sorting out this, this uh gold lock zone, is going to take significant computing power, to the extent that if you had so much computing power you might wonder whether it might be easy just to send a robot.
Speaker 3:And one of the earlier things that we asked the, the quantum physicists, is that um was the direction of a magnetic field important in terms of determining spin? And their view was that the direction of the field wasn't so important. And I was thinking at the time when the Earth's magnetic fields had flipped. And you do get a complete flip or wobble and, as you know, recently the North Pole has started moving at 23 kilometers a year as opposed to nine.
Speaker 3:And there was a very interesting paper from your uh part of the world, from new zealand, looking at the um sort of the geomatic magnetic history of the earth, and what it pointed out was that uh around about the times of the magnetic switches, where the poles switched um and the direction may not be important for spin.
Speaker 3:What happened is the Earth's magnetic fields dropped dramatically down to about 5 microteslas that's their estimate from the 45 to 50 or 45 to 60 that we exist in, and the suggestion was that these drops were coincided with mass extinction events. These drops were coincided with mass extinction events. So we're somewhat concerned about about about the impact of hypomagnetic fields on on human health, not only here on earth but, of course, acutely. We'll be able to study this acutely in space. So we can study this acutely in space. We can look at metabolic syndrome in space. We can can look at aging and you've got an accelerated laboratory environment in which we can bring the learnings back to hopefully deal with all of these issues that are occurring according to lifestyle changes on Earth has been said that space is a very good model for accelerated aging.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, you know, which is perhaps not what people want to hear, but we may I mean back to the fundamental question of aging, which we don't still fully understand. This could be a good model for it, um, which, of course, is not what everybody wants to hear, but maybe we've got to solve this one first, and the point we make, and we certainly certainly made in our presentations on this, is that, you know, we haven't haven't solved the ageing problem and health on Earth yet. How can we honestly expect to solve it in a much more complex environment like space? You know, when the beast is costing $2 trillion to $4 trillion a year, we're spending less than $100 billion on space health. You know, you do the maths.
Speaker 3:So I think Max, whereas we do have some really clear concerns.
Speaker 3:We don't want to alarm people too much, but if our thinking at the moment is borne out in further experimentation some of which has already been done and one paper came out of our work looking at prostate cancer cells and in the hypermagnetic chamber they grew more quickly but if we really need to get to grips with this phenomenon and I think if we can carry out the research in the UK and the US and elsewhere, we'll have these answers within about 12 to 18 months of whether this is a concern and to what extent it's a concern.
Speaker 3:I think it'll then take another couple of years to characterize fully, and probably the next two decades to work out how to mitigate on the immediate and the long term and with a significant amount of expenditure. So in that case, what we see is that space engineering is probably two decades ahead of space biology, with perhaps exception of the Chinese, who have been thinking about this for a few years. They've got some rather we found some in some obscure papers. We found their references to the impact of hypomagnetic fields on hippocampal cell growth, that sort of thing, and with one single line in their paper saying and this might have an impact on space travel. So we do think that some people have been thinking about this for a while, whereas others have completely. It's not been in the mainstream of of of their scientific endeavors.
Speaker 2:no, and and that's why I want to congratulate you both, and I think this report is is an absolute masterpiece because it's saying the inconvenient part for people like elon musk you know very, very much out loud, and it's really bringing some adult discourse to what sometimes can be as I use the word, quixotic, I mean grandiose, that you can pick an adjective.
Speaker 2:But, as you mentioned, the spending on space biology is a single digit or less as a proportion of space expenditure and it's so far removed from the reality, the biological realities which, albeit theoretical, you both have really laid out in this space report, and I'd really encourage people who are listening to go and back, read the space report yourself or check out my previous video it's on YouTube and my podcast feed where I provided some analysis on that report, on that report.
Speaker 2:But it's just my opinion that I think the look towards space by people like Musk it's admirable from an engineering point of view, but it really takes the emphasis away from planet Earth and the fact that there's so many important unsolved problems on planet Earth that chasing know, chasing after, um, you know, living on other planets, in my opinion, and is a misdirection of our amazing resources and and and um, you know intelligence and and talking about things like the interaction of light and life. You know I've been talking to photobiomodulation engineers and the amount of clinical research we could do looking at the various use of white wavelengths in cancer in name a medical condition is yet to be done. I think these are some of the most exciting things that potentially could be done. But, yeah, I really want to thank both for for putting this report out, because it's its value for space, but also for its implication for quantum biology and human health are are enormous well, thank you very much indeed.
Speaker 1:Thank you, if we, if we can identify the issues and correct them in terms of finding mitigations, if we can find the mitigations in the compressed time scale of the accelerations in space, then all of those learnings should help us, uh, work out how to treat, um, how to, how to treat the lifestyle induced illnesses that we're seeing on earth at the present so thanks I mean there is quite an interesting parallel here, because we certainly got into this, because we were looking at natural products and phenolic compounds and certainly the point this was exactly the point we're making and we know, certainly for nasa, they're looking at, you know, cocktails of different natural products to see if they can offset oxidation and I think there's some evidence that it might work, but I don't think it's going to be anything like enough. You know, it's like living a mediterranean style on steroids in space, but it probably still won't be enough to offset the problems. But it'll probably help, but we don't understand how they're working. And this is this again, it's another big question.
Speaker 3:Yes, it's a great point and we'd leave you with the thought that the medicines from nature that that are actually introducing into us and not only medicines, things like blueberries for the polyphenols and and strawberries the anthocyanins are all helping mitochondrial function. Why? Because they help mitochondrial function in the plants yeah, and the plants, and this is why because plants have mitochondria, and probably more as an information transmission than than energy, energy generation. So we have suggested in the report that one solution might be to grow the plants in space and feed the extracts of the plants to the astronauts, because the plants will work out exactly what adaptive responses it needs in terms of to maintain their mitochondrial function, which will then maintain the human's mitochondrial function. Just an interesting thought that we might leave you with.
Speaker 1:Well, it's an old idea, it's called xenohormesis thought that we might leave you with. Well, it's an old idea, it's called xenohormesis and it was an idea which was, I think, lambing a long time ago. Suggested that one of the reasons that plants help us, certainly in the autumn, is that we eat the plants when they're getting cold and they've been stressed, but that stress signal is passed on to us. That helps us live, be a bit stronger than we were before so so these are old ideas, that's probably another podcast for Max.
Speaker 1:I know it's not complete, yeah well, I would definitely.
Speaker 2:I think we need to continue this conversation about the myriad of topics and questions this discussion and ours previously Geoffrey, has opened up. So very much interested in talking to you both again, because I believe this is the cutting edge of of health and medicine and, uh, it's, yeah, it's a pleasure to to have such stimulating and interesting discussions with with you excellent, thank you.
Speaker 3:You can read about it in the book yes, yeah and uh, that's it.
Speaker 2:That's a great time to mention, and the blurred that, quantum biology. Yeah, it's all blurred.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a great time to mention the it's a bit blurred that quantum biology. It's all blurred, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit blurry, hang on, that's my Zoom settings. But Quantum Biology A Glimpse into the Future of Medicine by Dr Jeffrey W Guy. I highly recommend it and it's a great overview of the state of what the foundation is doing at the moment and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. So would recommend everyone grab a copy. It's on Amazon now, I believe Is it for sale on.
Speaker 3:Amazon, yeah, absolutely Worldwide. So thank you, max. Thank you very much indeed. We'd be happy to talk to you again. Fantastic, yes, certainly would do have a nice day, alistair. Thanks a lot. Thanks, man.
