ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Celine Halioua, the founder and CEO of Loyal—a company that researches drugs to extend the lifespan of dogs. They talk about the real meaning of longevity and when these drugs might be given to humans in the future.
Read Tom Simonite’s profile, “The Search for a Pill That Can Help Dogs—and Humans—Live Longer,” from our November 2022 issue.
Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Gideon Lichfield is @glichfield. Bling the main hotline at @WIRED.
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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Gideon Lichfield: Let's do it.
Lauren Goode: Let's do it. 3, 2, 1.
[Music]
Lauren Goode: Hi, I'm Lauren Goode.
Gideon Lichfield: And I'm Gideon Lichfield. And this is Have a Nice Future, a show about how terrifyingly fast everything is changing.
Lauren Goode: Each week, we talk to someone with big, audacious, often unnerving ideas about the future, and we talk about how we can all prepare to live in it.
Gideon Lichfield: This week, our guest is Celine Halioua, the CEO of Loyal, a company that's working on finding drugs to extend lifespans.
Celine Halioua (audio clip): To me, it's extremely stressful that there's these whole hosts of diseases that if you are diagnosed with them, there's not anything anybody can do for you, and many of those are age related diseases.
[Music]
Lauren Goode: Gideon, if you knew you had an extra 20 years to add to your life, what would you do with it?
Gideon Lichfield: Based on my parent's lifespan, that would get me well past 100. I think I would start a new career, like go back to my childhood dreams and be an astronaut.
Lauren Goode: It's interesting that your mind went straight to work, because I think that if I had an extra 20 years, it would affect how I live now. Like I would try to live more in the now and not stress so much about what's going to happen as I encroach upon midlife.
Gideon Lichfield: OK. So you just delay your midlife crisis till the age of 60.
Lauren Goode: Exactly, yes. Well, our guest today is very relevant to this conversation. She can't guarantee that we as humans are going to have some extra years, but she just might be able to do it for your dog.
Gideon Lichfield: Oh, that's disappointing. Especially since I don't have a dog.
Lauren Goode: Maybe it's time to get one. Maybe it'll help you extend your lifespan. But I hear you, I only have a cat right now, so I get the feeling.
Gideon Lichfield: Oh, good thing your cat doesn't know what he's missing out on.
Lauren Goode: Right. Anyway, even though she herself is only 28, Celine Halioua has been working on longevity for a long time. Her company, which is called Loyal, has been testing different clinical interventions to extend the life of dogs.
Gideon Lichfield: So I know people who have dogs—really love their dogs—but why is she working on dogs and not straight on humans?
Lauren Goode: This is a good question. Dogs are a great headline grabber. They're basically a detour on the way to extending human lifespan. When I asked Celine about this, she said that the way that dogs age is actually somewhat similar to the way that humans age. And so she thinks that eventually these clinical interventions could be used on humans.
Gideon Lichfield: OK. But when I hear about people trying to extend their lifespan, I usually think of some billionaire spending a crazy sum of money to try to live forever or freeze their head in a cryogenic chamber. It's just not a very good look.
Lauren Goode: Right. We've joked before about the blood of young interns on this show, and for some people, it's probably not a joke. I did pose this question to Celine, and she had an interesting answer. I get the sense that she's been asked this a lot, but she also came across as a lot more measured than most people in Silicon Valley who talk about this. I mean, she does have some big ideas around it, and she thinks that the pharmaceutical market for aging is going to be bigger than the cancer market.
Gideon Lichfield: Oh, yay. More drugs for everyone.
Lauren Goode: Right. That is definitely one perspective. I think this conversation is gonna bring up a lot of feelings for people, and I'll be curious to hear what you think.
Gideon Lichfield: I can't wait to hear that conversation, and that is coming up right after the break.
[Music]
Lauren Goode: Celine Halioua, thank you so much for joining me on Have a Nice Future.
Celine Halioua: Thank you, thank you.
Lauren Goode: Are you having a nice future?
Celine Halioua: Yeah, I would say that my team and I live in the future, so, so far so good.
Lauren Goode: The last time you were here in WIRED's offices, you had your adorable dog with you, Wolfie. In fact, there were a lot of dogs here that day because my colleague Tom Simonite was working on a cover story for WIRED about your company. Talk about some of the dogs we were meeting that day. What is your work like with them?
Celine Halioua: Yeah, so we work a lot with a San Francisco-based rescue called Muttville, which is a senior dog rescue, which is very relevant to us because we're developing drugs to make dogs, or hopefully make dogs live longer, healthier lives.
Lauren Goode: Why dogs?
Celine Halioua: Well, one, why not dogs? We all love dogs. It's a very non-controversial thing to develop a drug to extend dog lifespan, but I got especially interested in dog aging because I was working on human aging. And one of the challenges of human aging is, if I give you a drug today, it's gonna take decades for me to know if that drug works or doesn't work. How do I know what age-related disease you would or would not have gotten? Fundamentally, to see the endpoint of an aging drug, which is lifespan, is a much longer period of time than many companies survive, versus in dogs, you can see biological aging in a dog in about six months. You have the subset of dogs, large and giant breed dogs that live even shorter lifespans than the average dog, and they develop the same age-related diseases, diseases like cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, dementia, that humans do at approximately the same time in their lifespan. So if something reduces cognitive decline or delays cognitive decline in a dog, it's not one-to-one to work in a human, but it is way more compelling than it working in a mouse—a mouse of which doesn’t have an immune system and basically only develops and dies of cancer. They do have all these other scope of diseases.
Lauren Goode: You're probably familiar with the parody Twitter account called In Mice—
Celine Halioua: Oh my God, yes.
Lauren Goode: It was started back in 2019 by a Northeastern data scientist who was responding to some sensational news reports that came out about experiments or trials that work effectively in mice, but don't necessarily correlate to humans.
Celine Halioua: To be clear, mice are a great model, a very important model organism, and the basis of many, many scientific discoveries. But for aging, they're especially difficult. For example, something like dementia, you might be diagnosed when you're 70 or 80 or 90, but it's not like you were healthy one day and then developed dementia the next day. It's not like an infection, which is a binary process. You likely have been developing that dementia or the processes that lead to the dementia over decades. And it's just when you become diagnosed by a doctor, it's because the amount of neurons that you've lost become so significant that it's symptomatic, that somebody goes to look to see if you have something wrong with you, and a dog replicates that process. A dog develops dementia over time due to natural aging. A dog develops osteoarthritis over time due to natural aging. It's thought that dogs develop Parkinson's like a human does over time due to natural aging. Same thing with many of the cancers they get. While in a mouse, if we're trying to emulate these diseases, some of them they develop naturally, but the vast majority of the time you're actually inducing it falsely as a model of what it looks like in the future. And then the last thing I'll say on this is that it's also relevant because we have medical information about dogs. So dogs are the second largest medical market behind humans. So we have all of this—
Lauren Goode: Really?
Celine Halioua: Mm-hmm. We have all of this qualitative data about them: who were they owned by, how much care did they have, what were they diagnosed with at age 2, what vaccines did they get or not get? How much preventative care did they get? Did they bring them to the orthodontist or not? Like all of these things that are really important data points that allow you to ask these big data questions, which you're just not gonna get for a mouse.
Lauren Goode: What are your trials showing you so far?
Celine Halioua: One of the big challenges that we had to overcome—because nobody's ever gotten a drug approved for aging. If you're getting a drug approved for anti-itch or heartworm preventative, there's a very established path that has been predefined by companies before you that determines what you need to do to get approval, what the bar is, all of those things. That does not exist. So much of the last four years has been building that. At a high level, we've looked at a couple of interesting things. Obviously there's biomarker work. So there's the idea of what are certain predictor proteins or things in the blood that you can assess that tell if a drug works? I think one thing that we realized early on is that it actually doesn't move the needle for veterinarians or for the FDA. It has to be connected to objective measures of quality of life, and that both for a veterinarian to say that this dog seems like he or she's healthier, enough for the pet parent to notice it too. So what we did instead was connect various physiological markers—and let's call them phenotypes of aging, for example, cognition, metabolic fitness—to show that the drug was improving things that are known to reduce health span.
Lauren Goode: So it's not at the point yet where you have a control group of say Great Danes or rottweilers, and one group is on the drugs and they've lived longer, and another group is not on the drugs or they're using a placebo and they had shorter lives. It's that you're looking at specific biomarkers around health span, and so far, some of the evidence is suggesting that there's greater health or anti-aging in the dogs that are on the drugs?
Celine Halioua: Yeah. I wouldn't call it anti-aging. I would call it, we've improved markers of pathological aging that are tied to a reduction in quality of life.
Lauren Goode: So is it accurate to say then that it is improving dog longevity at this point in time? That seems like a leap.
Celine Halioua: We haven't extended dog lifespan yet, no.
Lauren Goode: OK. But that's the goal?
Celine Halioua: That's the goal.
Lauren Goode: How long before you think there is a breakthrough in this field?
Celine Halioua: What are you defining as a breakthrough?
Lauren Goode: Well, would you consider the FDA approval of the drug a breakthrough?
Celine Halioua: Yes.
Lauren Goode: And when do you anticipate this FDA approval might happen?
Celine Halioua: Yeah, so we are on track for, assuming everything goes correctly and it's all FDA regulated, having a product that pet parents can buy in 2025.
Lauren Goode: That's pretty remarkable.
Celine Halioua: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: This is a bit of a personal question, but what does longevity mean to you personally? When we reported the WIRED story on you, you were 28. Are you still 28, or have you—
Celine Halioua: Yes.
Lauren Goode: OK. So you're 28 years old. You are relatively young in both life—
Celine Halioua: Hey.
Lauren Goode: … and in the world of tech founders, although youth is definitely prized in Silicon Valley.
Celine Halioua: I would say I'm old for a tech founder.
Lauren Goode: Really? You feel that way?
Celine Halioua: Not for biotech, but there's a whole generation of like 20-year-olds here. It's a little stressful.
Lauren Goode: What does longevity mean to you?
Celine Halioua: To me, longevity is about freedom of will and reducing the risk that you won't be able to do the thing that you want to do because your biology kind of goes rogue. I'm not a longevity maximalist. I am not working on immortality. I've said many times, and nothing we're working on at all is a path to that. To me, it's extremely stressful that there are these whole host of diseases that if you are diagnosed with them, there's not anything anybody can do for you, and many of those are age-related diseases. So it's really about having a little bit more control over our biology.
Lauren Goode: Have you always been interested in this subject?
Celine Halioua: I actually got into college for art school, and then the summer before I started, I did—I really don't know why—I did an internship at a neuro-oncology clinic. I just sat around and watched the doctors do their jobs. And for me, that was what got me, from that moment, just 180 switched into it, because I met a number of patients who received the worst diagnosis of their lives, and I had always thought that doctors were magical and they can fix you if anything goes wrong with you. You tend to think that, when you're 17 or 18, that the adults in the room know what they're doing. And just realizing that so many of those patients, just there was nothing anybody could do for them, I came home and switched to neuroscience, and then just stayed in it ever since, and everything I've done has been about working on that theme of increasing free will from our biology.
Lauren Goode: So what are the specific drugs that you're using?
Celine Halioua: We cannot say that yet, but when we get closer to market we'll share.
Lauren Goode: Why can't you share that? Is it proprietary?
Celine Halioua: Candidly, we're a small company, and my philosophy has always been, we want to open up everything because I think no one company is going to own the aging space. Aging, I think, is gonna be as large or larger than oncology, but we wanna get there first and we want to … We've done all this work to create this pathway for a drug being FDA approved for aging, that we wanna make sure we get there, and we're still at a stage if you have a ton of money, you might be able to leapfrog.
Lauren Goode: How transferable will these drugs theoretically be to human longevity?
Celine Halioua: So I don't know if these specific drugs will be developed for human longevity, but the biology is absolutely relevant. The things that we're targeting are not dog-specific. We just think they are likely to be very helpful to dogs and to helping them extend their lifespan, and dogs, again, are a very good representative of people. So if it works in a dog, I think there's strong evidence to believe it would work in a human too.
Lauren Goode: I have to say, when I think about the anti-aging industry, and especially because I live here in San Francisco, I've lived in Silicon Valley, I've been covering this space for a while, I think of the billionaires who can't face their own mortality. They've been so successful in business that maybe on some level they can't believe that they can't hack their lives in that way. So we've seen these trends around cryogenics and hormones and stem cells and the “blood boys.” Do you hear that a lot from people when they hear what you are working on?
Celine Halioua: Yeah, it's something we really actively work to disassociate from, because it's negative for the average person, but it's also negative for scientific groups. I think it's actually one of the reasons a lot of serious money and serious talent hasn't gone into the space. It is because it kind of has this sheen of being illegitimate. Longevity has had that sheen since the beginning of time, but unfortunately now it was Twitter and whatnot, it threads further. But the way I think of it, it's like aging should be boring. The idea of a preventative medicine to reduce risk of future diseases is not sexy. It is a boring idea, and we really try to just focus on that and not lean into the immortality. Fundamentally, none of these companies can reach those promises. They just play into the hype more.
Lauren Goode: I'm sure you've seen the headlines lately of the founder who spends $2 million a year to try to hack a few years off his age.
Celine Halioua: Yeah. I don't—
Lauren Goode: For those of you who can't see in the podcast room right now, Celine is shaking her head.
[laughter]
Celine Halioua: Maybe, I'm like an old crogie, but I don't think it's good for the field, because I think it plays into this thing of like not respecting the FDA. Fundamentally, if we want to help people by developing aging drugs, they have to be FDA approved. That's it. That's it. That's the only way, or another regulatory body approved. Things like this just take away.
Lauren Goode: What's your response to people—if people ask this—to the idea that you're playing God by working in this space, by trying to extend lifespan?
Celine Halioua: We already did play God by creating dog breeds. Dog breeds are not a natural phenomenon. You can't look at a pug and think that a pug was evolutionarily selected for it to be the optimal type of its species. It was us. It wasn't them. I think people think about it in that way because it seems so different to think about a drug from the context of not a disease, but instead just generally improving quality of life and improving health span. But fundamentally it's just a medicine like a cancer drug. By that same logic, we shouldn't have cancer drugs. That's playing God. It's intervening in what would've happened naturally, biologically to this animal or person. We shouldn't have pain meds because that's naturally happening. It's the exact same thing. It's a therapy for a disease. It's just intervening at a point that is better for the patient. It's the less severe therapeutic, say, surgery or whatever and hopefully more effective because it's early on in the disease process.
Lauren Goode: When you stand back a little bit and you think about this evolution in humans and our ability to live longer than we used to, and how there are these scientific advancements that are getting us longer and longer lives, healthier lives, happening concurrently with everything that's going on in the environment. How do you square that?
Celine Halioua: Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. I think, again, similar to the playing God philosophy, by that logic, we shouldn't have vaccines for children to prevent them from getting certain diseases. They're not actually at odds to take care of the planet, which we should. They're not mutually exclusive. I think that's a really important thing to understand, and we're already doing it with the scope of medicines that we have. But also, fundamentally, anti-aging drugs, if successful and if widely adopted, could help a population be more productive. Sure as hell, none of the drugs we're developing, and I don't know of anybody who is developing a drug that's gonna radically extend lifespan. I really think of it more as rounding out the curve. So if you think of it as if you have age on the x-axis and quality of life on the y-axis, it's kind of flat for a while and it starts declining until you get to that period of end of life. The idea of an aging drug really is gonna be more about extending the number of years that somebody is in that healthy productive state. And we're gonna be facing some of the biggest challenges that humanity has ever faced and we need as many functional smart brains as possible, and we need to have a population, a younger population that's not burdened with caring for an older population that isn't able to take care of themselves, that is cognitively struggling, that struggles to learn new ideas. It just really holds back the society.
Lauren Goode: Right. Because there are some people who critique this field and say that it would be an economic disaster.
Celine Halioua: I think it's the opposite. I think having a population of people who are living longer and longer, because we're still developing drugs for the end-stage diseases. It's not like we're not developing drugs that help Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and cancer patients live longer. But it's, we're having these people living longer because of these new medicines and this general supportive ability, but not able to care for themselves, require a lot of time, effort, money from their families, from society, that holds back the younger generation, and it especially holds back people who are not of means. If you don't have the money to put your parent in a home, you're taking care of your parent. Your parents in your spare bedroom. It has a knockdown effect that negatively impacts the people, especially in this country where we have terrible health care. It negatively impacts the people who have the least wiggle room already.
Lauren Goode: That makes me wonder whether or not there could be equity issues when drugs like this eventually do hit the market. We joke about the billionaires, but is this going to be something that only privileged people have access to, and how are you working to ensure that more people can access drugs that help with health span?
Celine Halioua: Yeah, so that's just something that we think about a lot. I can't control what others are working on in the longevity field, and I think one of the things I've actually spoken about in general is people building actually simpler products, because there's a direct correlation between something being complex and something being expensive. Think of cell therapy or a gene therapy, it can be $500,000 to $1 million, versus a small molecule is nothing. The drugs that we are developing are all very optimized for cogs. So therefore that means we can—
Lauren Goode: For cogs you said?
Celine Halioua: Sorry, cost of goods and services—the material cost of manufacturing the product. We've been optimizing on that from day one because I don't want our products to be products for rich people or products for dogs owned by rich people—rich dogs. The idea is that the price point will be accessible to as large a population as possible. So we don't have a final price yet, but think tens of dollars per month, in the mid-low tens is what we're going for.
Lauren Goode: What keeps you up at night?
Celine Halioua: One of the negative things about biology building and biotech in general is that sometimes when crazy ideas like this fail, even if it has nothing to do with the validity of the core idea, it kind of bombs out the space for everybody else. So it paradoxically will actually slow progress. So I feel a great deal of responsibility in making sure that we execute to the maximal degree we can, to maximize the probability of success, so that if these drugs can work, um, and if we can execute on it, that it, that it occurs.
Lauren Goode: So basically what keeps you up at night is the idea that you might be shooting at the wrong targets.
Celine Halioua: Yeah. It's impossible to know.
Lauren Goode: And it's very expensive, every shot you take.
Celine Halioua: Exactly. And the way I would describe it is like, regardless of religious background, like there is a kind of God in biology and that the truth is predetermined. It is already determined in our atoms whether these drugs will extend dogs' healthy lifespan. It's about us catching up. I cannot do anything to change that. It's one of the reasons, um, Silicon Valley people have gotten in trouble is because, you know, there are certain lines in the sand when it comes to biology that you just can't move around.
Lauren Goode: What's the best vision of longevity in the future?
Celine Halioua: What do you mean?
Lauren Goode: What does it look like? Paint an ideal scenario, and even though I know it's hard for a startup founder, maybe take the funding out of the equation for a moment and pretend that that's not a constraint. What does the ideal vision of longevity look like to you?
Celine Halioua: For me, it would be a daily, very safe drug that the majority of Americans take to reduce their risk of future age-related diseases. But if we could also reduce the risk of dementia, osteoarthritis, all these other diseases that plague people too, age-related diseases, that would be very, very impactful.
Lauren Goode: Let's paint a little picture. You’re 80-year-old Celine, God willing, and you've got your, your Bernese mountain dogs that are all 18 years old.
Celine Halioua: Hell yeah!
Lauren Goode: They've been hanging out with you for a long time. What does your day look like? What does your health look like? Would you still be working? Would you still be gardening? Would you be running marathons?
Celine Halioua: I mean, I'd still be working. To be clear, I don't think that every 80-year-old should work, nor am I trying to do that, but I would love—
Lauren Goode: Is this is a remark on your generation, still working?
Celine Halioua: I would love to be able to be helping facilitate crazy stuff when I'm 80. The way I think about it is that my body wouldn't be restricting what I wanna do. So if I wanna go on a long hike, I can do that, and it's not dangerous or painful or more painful than doing a hike now or in 20 years or whatever would be. It would mean that I'm cognitively there, so I can engage with my grandchildren or great-grandchildren. I can learn how to use new technology and not be static in the the archaic iPhone of my childhood. Yeah, I'll just be able to keep up with the younger generations of my hopefully very sweet and successful family.
Lauren Goode: Celine, thank you so much for joining me on Have a Nice Future.
Celine Halioua: Thank you.
Lauren Goode: This has been such a great conversation and I hope you have a nice future.
Celine Halioua: Me too, me too. [Laughter]
[Music]
Gideon Lichfield: So I think I'm still not entirely clear on what Celine thinks about extending human lifespan. She's working on making dogs live longer, but she also said she's not a longevity maximalist, she doesn't believe in immortality. Does she believe in making humans actually live longer or just making our lives healthier?
Lauren Goode: Well, we should probably point out the difference between health span and lifespan quickly. Lifespan is how long you live, and health span is how many healthy years you have. And it seems like a lot of the research Celine is talking about is related to health span, and that may have outcomes in terms of lifespan. But to answer your question, I think it's more the latter, that it's a bit of a leap at this point to say the drugs that she's working on are directly going to affect longevity, but rather she's working on cures to aging-related diseases and that the drugs are showing some improvements in biomarkers around aging-related diseases. And that if you can essentially hack those, then maybe it means, yes, some people live longer.
Gideon Lichfield: But it almost feels as if she's trying to have it both ways, because she talks about making aging boring and focusing on curing the diseases of aging rather than actually making people live longer. But then her research on dogs is about longevity. And so I think it attracts attention for that reason, because she is saying, what we learn in dogs, we could apply to humans. So she's getting the benefit of the pizzazz around aging research, longevity research, but then saying, no, no, no, this is not actually about making people live longer.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, there is a duality to some of the ideas that Celine is presenting with Loyal. I mean, anytime you're talking about extending the lifespan of warm, cuddly, adorable senior dogs, man's best friend, it's going to get a lot of attention.
Gideon Lichfield: Right, who doesn't love that?
Lauren Goode: Who doesn't love that? I think there's a lot of validity to what she said about how hard it is to really track human longevity when we do tend to live for so long, versus the much shorter lifespan of a dog. But I think that also this is just the way of Silicon Valley. When you take an idea that maybe has been in academic research or in the lab, and then you're trying to commercialize it, you're trying to raise money for it, and you're trying to bring into the public, you need a tagline, and I think her tagline is dogs.
Gideon Lichfield: One of the things that's interesting about the research she's doing is that, part of the paradigm shift they're trying to bring about is to understand aging as a disease. Because, at least in America, for something to get FDA approval, you have to have a condition that is considered a disease, and then you have to be able to show that the drug makes that condition better by a certain amount. And the problem is that aging isn't classified as a disease. Aging is just aging. There are diseases that come with aging. And so the challenge for people like Celine has been how to measure the effect that those drugs are having. If you call them anti-aging drugs or longevity drugs, it's actually hard to make that case. But if you target them, if you say these are drugs for helping prevent dementia or helping prevent osteoarthritis or other conditions that are commonly associated with aging, then it's easier for you to say, “Here are the standards by which they should be measured, and here's how we know that they're being effective.”
Lauren Goode: Right. If you say it's anti-aging, it's goop. And if you say it's for osteoporosis, it's something that people, the FDA, the public will take seriously. Let me ask you this. If the trials that Loyal was doing for dogs had largely positive results and there were FDA-approved drugs out on the market, and let's assume that they were accessible to the average person, would you personally be interested in taking some of those drugs if you knew that it was going to, I don't wanna say cure some ailment of yours, but help with some aging-related ailment?
Gideon Lichfield: Sure, I would. I mean, I think one of the things that I fear the most is spending a long time in the last years of my life not being able to do very much, whether that's from dementia or from physical decline. So yeah, if you can say to me, you're not gonna live longer, but your last 10 or 15 years are actually gonna be a lot better than they would've been otherwise, that's absolutely something I would do.
Lauren Goode: Interesting.
Gideon Lichfield: What about you? Are you hesitant?
Lauren Goode: I wonder sometimes about the level of interventions that we are willing to accept or integrate into our lives, and at what point we cross the threshold from “this is really helping me live a better life” to “this is unnatural in some way that is actually interrupting natural process of aging.”
Gideon Lichfield: We interrupt so many natural processes of our lives already. I mean, I thought Celine was very convincing on this point, when you asked her about whether we're playing God with dog's lives. Well, we already, we've been playing God for thousands of years just by breeding dogs, and we've been playing God on ourselves for as long as medicine has existed, trying to slow, prevent, fix the problems that nature throws at us. So I actually don't see this kind of drug as any different from anything else that we already do.
Lauren Goode: I saw a viral TikTok the other day of a young woman who said, “I'm an IVF baby.” I think about this a lot. Her mother had multiple embryos to choose from and chose her, and then later chose her younger sibling. And it makes me wonder if years from now, someone saying, “I'm one of the first Loyal babies. My mom had me when she was 68 years old because she extended her health span through Loyal—this drug that started for dogs.”
Gideon Lichfield: That I think is a really interesting problem. The question of whether people should be able to give birth at the age of 68 is gonna be a much more contentious one than whether it should be possible to extend people's lives by 10 years. Because then you get into everyone's preconceptions about how old is too old to be a parent, and can you take care of a child effectively?
Lauren Goode: OK, but isn't Al Pacino about to have another baby, and he's in his 80s? I mean, come on.
Gideon Lichfield: Fair, fair. You're totally right.
Lauren Goode: This question doesn't come up for men. But I think that's your point, the question of, OK, can people not just reproduce but be good parents or what you said earlier, change careers at midlife and decide to become an astronaut. These are things that we can only accomplish if we are actually healthy in our elder years, if we're not just old, but we're actually, we have good health span. And in general, I'm in favor of that. I think we've unpacked a lot of the potential positives of this, or at least the things that we feel somewhat comfortable with. What part of Loyal is most unnerving to you?
Gideon Lichfield: I think, as I've already said, the fact that this is touted as a longevity drug for dogs maybe creates some false expectations about what's possible in humans. And I think it would be a lot healthier if we did indeed stop talking about making people's lives longer and instead making them healthier, which is what Celine is going for. But there is a risk, I think, that this contributes to the hype around extending human lifespans. What about you?
Lauren Goode: I tend to agree with you, and I think that while we're focused on helping people live healthier lives, improving health spans, we should also probably look at how to help people be a little bit happier. Not that happy is ever going to be a constant state, nor should we expect it to be, but there are just so many issues that we're facing right now as a society, that maybe we can look past helping some of the wealthier people live a few extra years and instead focus on, I don't know, getting everyone better access to care.
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Gideon Lichfield: That's our show for today. You can read Tom Simonite's profile of Celine Halioua and her research on dogs on WIRED.com. A link to that piece will be in the episode description.
Lauren Goode: We'll be off next week for the 4th of July, but we're back on Wednesday, July 12th, with a brand new episode.
Gideon Lichfield: Thank you for listening. Have a Nice Future is hosted by me, Gideon Lichfield.
Lauren Goode: And me. Lauren Goode. If you like the show we would love—
Gideon Lichfield: Or even if you don't—
Lauren Goode: Even if you don't, we would love to hear about it. You can leave us a rating and a review wherever you get your podcasts.
Gideon Lichfield: And don't forget to subscribe so you can get new episodes every week. You can also email us on nicefuture@wired.com. Tell us what you are worried about, what excites you, any questions you have about the future, and we'll try to answer them with our guests.
Lauren Goode: Have a Nice Future is a production of Condé Nast Entertainment. Danielle Hewitt from Prologue Projects produces the show. Our assistant producer is Arlene Arevalo. Our engineer is Benjamin Frisch.
Gideon Lichfield: See you back here the Wednesday after next. And until then, have a nice future.
Lauren Goode: Nice future.
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