Doris Taylor: The Art of the Pig to Human Heart

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Doris Taylor. Doris is a true pioneer in the field of cardiovascular regenerative medicine. She's credited with numerous scientific and medical breakthroughs. She's also the founder of multiple companies dedicated to cardiovascular repair technologies. I kid you not, she's going to explain the process of creating personalized hearts for humans from pig hearts, P-I-G, like oink oink. Wrap your mind around that. This technology apparently beats the hell out of heart transplants human to human. If Apple had invented this process, we'd be calling it Desktop Hearts. God help us. I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People. And now here's the remarkable Doris Taylor.
Doris Taylor:
Let's do this.
Guy Kawasaki:
First of all, I've got to tell you Steve Jobs story. So, Steve Jobs is famous for when he did demos of new Apple products, he would do this blow away demo and then just when everybody thought it was over, he would come back and he would say, "I've got one more thing." And then he would blow them away again. And so I have to tell you that my favorite part of the CNN interview was that when it was all over and you're telling Sanjay and the other guy, "One more thing. One more thing." And you talked about LGBTQ issues, I thought that was just priceless.
Doris Taylor:
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, you're the Steve Jobs of cellular biology or whatever.
Doris Taylor:
Wow.
Guy Kawasaki:
There you go.
Doris Taylor:
I'll take that comparison to some degree.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, listen, we'll come to the easy stuff about human induced pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes. But let's start with something hard. Tell us about growing up in Mississippi, since I know that let's just say there were some issues based on that CNN little section.
Doris Taylor:
Right, right.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, tell us about growing up in Mississippi.
Doris Taylor:
The cool thing about growing up in Mississippi, we moved to Mississippi from Europe when my dad died when I was six. So, my mom took us to Mississippi to be near her family because she had three kids, six and under, and found herself as a single parent. But the amazing thing about my mom is when we got there, she said, "These people are living in 1865, you don't have to." And she pointed out, throughout our lifetime, ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
So, I think really growing up in Mississippi, I saw people, just everyday people, stepping up and making a difference, and that was phenomenal. At the same time, when I went to college in Mississippi, I was naive. I was young, I was naive. I was probably, I think I was seventeen when I started college, and probably emotionally twelve. And my last semester my senior year, the dean at the time, for reasons I don't fully understand, accused a number of people of being gay, and I was one of them.
So, my last semester my senior year of college, I was sent home from college, we were sent to psychiatrists, we were given drugs, and they did everything they could to get us to admit we were gay. And I remember going home and having a conversation with my mom, and she said, "Is it true?" And I said, "I don't know," because literally I wasn't even sure what being gay meant.
Because I thought only the girls who played volleyball and met that really stereotypic image of being LGBTQ were. I knew I was emotionally attached at the hip to my roommate, but I didn't know that made me gay. However, they saw more than I did. And we were basically sent to doctors and all these people to admit it. And finally my mom stood up for us.
My mom was phenomenal. She stood up for us. But as soon as I was twenty-one and could, I left home, because it was embarrassing for my family, because I was in fact LGBTQ, I just didn't fully understand the implications of that. X amount of time later, by the time she died, my mom was saying the word lesbian more than I was, and talking to parents of kids who were coming out. And she really continued to make a difference in the world. She was remarkable. So, I aspire to make her proud. So, I got out of Mississippi. The good news is it got me out of Mississippi, but it also made me realize that being different has costs. But throughout my career then I've been different. Throughout my life, I've been different.
Guy Kawasaki:
Was it ever an issue to get your advanced degrees?
Doris Taylor:
No, it was not an issue because when my mom stood up for me, what happened is before all this happened, I had a really high GPA. So, the Dean of the Academics made an exception, sat down with me and my mom, made an exception, let me go to another university and take the courses. I had been failed out of my last semester my senior year. So, if you look at my transcript it's A's and B's and occasional not A or B, and then my last semester, it's all F's. And then she let me go take those courses. I made all A's and she let me transfer the hours back and get a degree a year later.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, why were they all F's?
Doris Taylor:
They flunked us out of our courses when they kicked us out.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, for being gay?
Doris Taylor:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Doris Taylor:
So, I actually think, this is all speculation on my part looking back, but knowing more now, I think the dean, not the academic dean, but the dean who did all this, I think she was probably a closet case, and I think she was probably doing some purging because she was uncomfortable with how outspoken some of us were about rights. And so one of the coolest things in my life is a few years ago, I got to go back to that university and deliver the commencement address.
Guy Kawasaki:
What? Yeah? Oh my God. A lesbian gave the commencement address.
Doris Taylor:
Yes. And they nominated me for the National Most Distinguished Alumni, and I won. So, full circle.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. That is a great story. Okay, so now we've got the special Steve Jobs moment covered. Let's start off with something my simple mind can maybe comprehend and help listeners comprehend. What is a stem cell?
Doris Taylor:
Oh, that's simple. That's very simple. Stem cells are simply cells that can do two things. They can make more of themselves or self-renew, and they can "differentiate" or become a number of different things. So, they can become a lot of different tissues. We all have stem cells in almost every tissue of our body, and in our bone marrow and our blood. So, stem cells are not the scary cells that everyone thinks about. They're simply cells that actually repair our body for most of our lives.
Guy Kawasaki:
But as you get older, they don't repair as well. So, this is not an infinite supply.
Doris Taylor:
As we age, our stem cells decrease in number and the ones we have decrease in potency. And the example I use to show that the best is if you think about it, when you're two years old and you fall down and scrape your knee, it turns red. That redness is inflammation. And that's the key right there. Inflammation is nature's cue to say, "Help. I've got an injury. Send me cells to repair it." So, when you're two, those cells come and they repair it. And an important piece is they repair it from the outside in. Think about that. When you scrape your knee, never starts healing on the inside moving out. It's always on the outside moving in.
The same thing happens inside our body. When we get an injury, our body says, "Help. I've got an injury." That's inflammation. "Send me cells." And stem cells get mobilized to the spot. And if the right cells get there and repair the injury, they turn off the inflammation. But when you're fifty-two or sixty-two and you fall down and you scrape your knee, you still get the inflammation. You still ultimately, for the most part you heal, but you no longer regenerate, you repair and you repair with a scar. And so that's because our cells have lost number and potency.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait. Now this is going to be a really stupid question, but in a sense you're saying that inflammation is a good thing because it calls for the cavalry.
Doris Taylor:
That's exactly right. Acute inflammation is a good thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
But then what happens if you put ice on an injury and you try to reduce inflammation? Are you telling the cavalry, "Okay, don't come?"
Doris Taylor:
You ask a very interesting question. No. At the same time, because you don't fully turn off the inflammation, you reduce it. One of the things that people learned early on in heart disease, for a short period of time after someone had a heart attack, they would give steroids to try to turn off the inflammatory response. And what they found is that giving steroids could actually cause more injury because you did exactly what you said. Those stem cells never got there to form a scar and the heart could actually rupture. So, steroids are now contraindicated. You never give steroids after a heart attack for exactly the reason you just talked about.
But let me also say acute inflammation is nature's cue. You want to turn that off when you get the repair. If you don't get the right cells there, then your body ramps up the inflammation and it says, "Hey, I said send me cells." And then you start recruiting the wrong cells there that are pro-inflammatory, and that's when a chronic inflammation cascade happens. And that's not good. That's when you start getting all the secondary injury.
Guy Kawasaki:
Sounds like our political system, but I digress.
Doris Taylor:
The whole five-hour conversation.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, listen, I heard this rumor that you have scientific proof that women are superior to men at the cellular level. Pray tell, please give us the details.
Doris Taylor:
First of all, there's so much data, where do I start? But I'll start with the fact that if you look at the numbers of stem cells and potencies of stem cells that exist in a number of organs and tissues, they're different than men. And women seem to have more of the reparative cells, whereas men have more pro-inflammatory cells in their bone marrow and sometimes in their blood. And I make the joke, but that doesn't surprise me.
But really it could actually begin to explain in part why men develop things like heart disease earlier than women, and that women catch up later as they age, and those cells go down. Also, the repair process has to be different in men and women because women have to be able to maintain a pregnancy. And if women had the same pro-inflammatory, get rid of everything foreign cells that men do, I think we wouldn't be able to maintain a pregnancy. Now, I haven't proven that, but that's my underlying hypothesis.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't want to beat a dead horse, but you just said at the cellular level, men are trying to get rid of everything foreign. That is another metaphor for our political system. But I digress. Now, this is kind of off the wall, but as I learned this in doing research for you, what happens if we go like full Margaret Atwood and men start harvesting female stem cells to prolong their lives? Is that possible?
Doris Taylor:
I'll tell you an experiment we did, and we can draw a conclusion from that. And what got me involved in this is in a science lab when we wanted to see if heart atherosclerosis, the buildup of plaque, actually could be reversed by using stem cells as a therapy. So, we did an experiment and we wanted to be able to track the cells. And at that time, the way you tracked cells was you gave male cells to females and you gave female cells to males, and you looked at where the Y chromosome was. Okay?
So, we did that experiment where we had these animals that had really high cholesterol and really high inflammation, and we gave male cells to females and female cells to males. The female cells repaired the injury, the male cells had no effect. We're back to that metaphor, aren't we?
And so could female cells have an effect in males? Absolutely. However, I also think that there are ways to actually have those endogenous effects. Talk about endogenous repair. And I've done experiments over the years looking at a lot of different alternative therapies that actually can have an impact on the number and potency of your stem cells in blood. Exercise matters.
We did a small experiment on acupuncture and showed that it increased the number of circulating stem cells. One of the coolest things I ever got to do in my life is draw blood from one of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama's monks, before and after he meditated and show that his circulating progenitor stem cells went up 40 percent in fifteen minutes.
Guy Kawasaki:
What?
Doris Taylor:
Yes. So, there are all those things we've been told all our lives. Exercise, meditation, acupuncture, stress reduction, all of those have an effect on our actual physiology. Before you ask me another question, let me just say one more thing. Stress is another word for inflammation. And if you don't believe that, look at a president before and after four years.
Guy Kawasaki:
I saw your slide. Yes.
Doris Taylor:
Their stem cells fail pretty fast.
Guy Kawasaki:
And I also saw a thread in your coverage that there are people who think we should not do this kind of cellular research. What would be the rationale to not do research in this?
Doris Taylor:
I think there are a lot of people who mistakenly believe that stem cells only come from a fertilized egg or an aborted fetus. And that is not the reality. Very few to zero studies are actually being conducted with any kind of embryonic or fetal stem cell these days. These days, the research is being done from either stem cells from your own body or stem cells that have been created from your blood in the laboratory, the induced pluripotent stem cells, or from stem cells from someone else that are donated for your use. So, I think it's based on misinformation and fear.
Guy Kawasaki:
We can't study Black history, we can't study stem cells. We're narrowing the fields down. But I digress again.
Doris Taylor:
I support your digression and I want to say that I view regenerative medicine as a healthcare inequity issue. And when we get to organ transplant, we can talk about that. If you're a Caucasian individual, the wait time for a heart is about a year. If you're an African-American or a Black individual, it's one and a half to two years if you even make the list. And we don't even have good data on Latin people or on Asian people or on people from other ethnicities. All the data are about the Caucasian population.
Guy Kawasaki:
And the Caucasian male population, right?
Doris Taylor:
Right. If you look at cardiovascular stem cell studies, the average percentage of women included, much less people of color, is 17 percent. So, we do not include women at the same numbers as men, even though heart disease is the number one killer of men, women, and children on the planet.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, now, to move on to your exciting work first, if I may, let me see if I got this straight. So, basically you bank a person's heart cells. You create a universal scaffold from a pig's heart, and then you use a baby shampoo like product to wash out the pig's heart cells. And then you grow 350 billion heart cells from the person's bank and immerse the pig's heart in it. And the cells know what part of the heart to grow. And all of this takes ninety days, bada bing, bada bang, you have your personalized new heart. Did I get that right?
Doris Taylor:
You got that close. Yes. Very close.
Guy Kawasaki:
What did I miss?
Doris Taylor:
So, we don't bank heart cells, we bank a person's stem cells. So, first we take blood, we create these induced pluripotent stem cells from a person, and then we bank those. That takes about twelve weeks. And then we have to grow the cells to grow the 350 billion, and then we turn them into heart cells. Because heart cells don't divide and replicate and make more of themselves. If they did, we could probably repair the damage in our own hearts. We wouldn't need all these therapies. But you're right, we take the equivalent of baby shampoo, wash out those pig cells.
It's cool, isn't it? It's a little scary, but it's cool. And then we put a person cells into that scaffold. We actually inject them in with the robot now and then we have to teach that how to mature, how to grow up and become a mature heart. And that takes another twelve to fourteen weeks. So, yeah, it's a six to eight month process all told. But we just talked about the wait list for a heart and how it's over a year now. It fits within that timeframe, plus most people who have a heart attack know that at some point in their life they're going to need a heart. What if we did this before they had to get so sick and we could actually give them a heart in advance? And the cool thing is because it's made from their own cells, then you don't have to take the toxic drugs that go along with an organ transplant today.
Guy Kawasaki:
One of the eye-opening things for me was I thought, thank you God, I got a heart transplant, life goes on. But then I learned you have $30,000 worth of drugs and these drugs cause other things to happen. So, it's not like you walk out of that hospital and life goes on.
Doris Taylor:
It's not the Hollywood ending that we think. I agree with you. That was a hard realization for me, that essentially when you get an organ transplant today, you're alive. It's true. But you're trading one disease for another. You're trading your heart disease or your kidney disease or your liver disease for high blood pressure, diabetes, potentially cancer because you're immunosuppressed. And then ultimately more renal failure down the road, kidney failure down the road.
So, as a young woman said to me recently, she said she received a heart transplant at eighteen, and she sent me an email and I asked her permission to use this, so I have her permission, but she said, it's been eight years of medical visits, biopsies and drugs. And she said, it's true I don't have heart failure anymore, but instead I have OCD and anxiety because I'm terrified that I'm going to die because I'm so busy I forgot to take my drugs one day.
Guy Kawasaki:
Going back to that process, it sounds like every step is hard in creating a personalized heart, but what's the hardest step?
Doris Taylor:
I think to date the hardest step for us has been growing the cells to the numbers we need, because all the tools and reagents we needed to do that didn't exist. And it took me years of my life to figure out the reagents and tools we needed. Twelve to fourteen years of my life. However, let me also say for the most part overcome that hurdle, although it's still outrageously expensive, and now we're trying to get the cost down. And so the hurdle we face most now is convincing ourselves that stem cells from every person are going to make a mature heart. So, now we have to train every one of these hearts to grow up and be mature, and we just have to do it over and over to where we're convinced our process is robust enough, because nobody wants a heart that beats most minutes. Everybody wants a heart that beats every minute.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now tell us, this has been a twenty something year saga, right?
Doris Taylor:
Right.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, when you came up with this idea, being the lesbian woman that you are, did like people fall over saying, "Yeah, this is possible. Let's do this here. Here's a grant." Or did you constantly face nay saying and it can't be done, it shouldn't be done, not possible. What was that like?
Doris Taylor:
So, let me first say that this idea came out of my lab at the University of Minnesota. And the University of Minnesota was phenomenal in supporting the endeavor and getting the word out and helping us show the work that this concept was feasible. However, after that, when I left the University of Minnesota and I went to Texas Heart Institute, we had great support from the state of Texas, but grants were harder to get in this space. And I think in part, so when we first came up with the idea and we tried to get it published, the experiments took a year, getting it published took over two years.
Because some reviewers said, "If she has a heart that's still beating, she didn't wash all the heart cells out." Other people said, "This is not novel." Someone else said, "It's impossible." And I was like, "How do you reconcile all this?" And finally, I said to an editor, thankfully, who was then phenomenal. I said, "Look, today a heart can live four hours once you remove it from the body. After four hours, you cannot transplant a heart. So, if we took a heart and exposed it to soap and kept it alive for seven days, that's worth publishing anyway." And that's when the editor got on board and said, "Yeah, you're right. You've jumped through enough hoops here." And we got it published.
But even then, it felt a little bit like we were flying in the face of conventional wisdom. And it's been a little bit of an uphill struggle to get the funding because this is not inexpensive. This is not a $250,000 a year research grant. This is, I've got to prove it's going to work. Every heart costs $60,000 to $80,000, just for the cells. Just for the cells, because the reagents are not made at this scale. And so the reagents are made for research, which is a million cells. So, we have to pay a million times 450 times three worth of reagents for one heart.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, now we're in obviously the intensive investment stage, but let's say everything goes well. What's this heart going to cost?
Doris Taylor:
Today a heart transplant for an individual over the lifetime of their transplant costs about $2.8 million.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Doris Taylor:
The reimbursement cost for organ procurement today, and everything that goes into that is on the order of $350,000. Everything we've budgeted is that $350,000 cost for these hearts. That being said, if we are successful, we will decrease the overall cost of organ transplant by up to half, because you won't then need all the drugs, you won't have all the hospitalizations afterwards, you won't have all the consequences downstream. And my commitment is to doing everything I can to make this accessible, including spending some percentage of our profits going forward once we're a profitable company, to make these hearts available to people who otherwise couldn't get them. It's about we are working every day to build a heart, but the reality is we're all building heart on the planet if we choose to. My mom taught me we're all in this together or we're all going to go down separately. And I truly believe that we need to be in this together.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just for clarification, are you saying the goal is to go from three million to one and a half million or from $350,000 to $175,000?
Doris Taylor:
So, our goal is to go for, right now, the whole cost is three million, but that includes all your hospitalization and everything.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, the three million is for a traditional heart transplant or your transplant?
Doris Taylor:
No, a traditional heart transplant. Our goal is to reduce that by 50 percent.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So, a million and a half and you get your personalized heart without all the after effects.
Doris Taylor:
Right. And the drugs.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now, how does Dean Kamen fit into this? Because you're using Segway scooters to get from the lab.
Doris Taylor:
That's right. We've got our hearts on little boxes on a Segway. No, Dean Kamen has built what is called the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Initiative in Manchester, New Hampshire. So, Dean has essentially converted the old mill yards in Manchester to biomanufacturing. He's built clean rooms, he's built educational and workforce development endeavor. So, a number of years ago, he received a $80 million Department of Defense funding to make this possible. And Dean has been one of the biggest proponents of our work. He's not only supported our efforts there at ARMI, but has helped us get access to speaking opportunities and exposure that I think will enable us ultimately to get this funded.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now I just cannot resist asking you this next question. I think I have maybe five Republican listeners and I'm about to lose them right now.
Doris Taylor:
Uh-oh.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, let's just say that maybe Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis needs a heart transplant and they could benefit from your personalized heart made with their own cells. And now they won't have the whole thing of cancer and all these after effects. But Ron and Don, I have to tell you that this technology was invented by a LGBTQ doctor, so your heart is a woke heart and it uses stem cells, and it came from a pig. Do you still want this? I cannot wait for that day when they have to figure out, oh my God, I'm going to get a woke heart. There's no question in there. I just want to see your reaction.
Doris Taylor:
You're putting me in an awkward situation.
Guy Kawasaki:
I know.
Doris Taylor:
It reminds me of when we did the first research and we showed that we could build a rat heart, which was the first heart we built, David Letterman said something to the effect of, "Scientists at the University of Minnesota have created a rat heart in a laboratory. Maybe there's hope for Dick Cheney." So, I'm just saying maybe we've come full circle.
Guy Kawasaki:
And of course, the irony is that his daughter is one of the sane ones.
Doris Taylor:
And I actually wondered early on if people would be afraid of the pig heart. But today people get pig heart valves, they get pig heart vessels. And I sat down with a couple of religious folks and leaders and I asked them what their reaction to the use of pig organs was. And they said to me, "The sanctity of human life comes first."
Guy Kawasaki:
Huh, that's good. And no one from PETA has reached out to you and said, "You can't kill pigs to save humans?"
Doris Taylor:
We don't kill pigs. We don't kill pigs. We actually get our hearts from USDA approved food vendors right now and going forward we are looking at sources of the scaffold. I really think we have to think about the footprint that we leave on the planet. So, we're going to try to make the right choices there as well.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, are you saying you get the pig hearts from pigs that have been slaughtered to eat?
Doris Taylor:
Let me say, we get the hearts from vendors who are slaughtering pigs to eat. I'm not going to tell you they're mixing in the food chain, because I don't know that, I'm not behind the door and I don't want to get them in trouble by implying something I don't know.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Doris Taylor:
I can tell you we get them from the United States Department of Agriculture approved vendors today.
Guy Kawasaki:
Huh. I'm friends with Andrew Zimmern, and I could ask him what he thinks about this.
Doris Taylor:
That's great.
Guy Kawasaki:
He's from Minnesota.
Doris Taylor:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Go Gophers.
Doris Taylor:
Go Gophers.
Guy Kawasaki:
Speaking of pigs, Doris, is your phone constantly ringing with VCs and tech entrepreneurs who consider themselves indispensable to society so they want to bank on having a heart available already and they'll pay any price to get in front of the line?
Doris Taylor:
I wish they were, because I did have someone ask me early on. And that's what actually really pushed me over the edge of going forward with this in terms of a business as opposed to another research endeavor. Someone said, "I pay $24,000 a month to hanger my plane. What would it cost me to hanger a heart?"
I wish a few of those folks would call me and pay me to develop this process so that they could. And one of the things we're actually looking at is crowdfunding some of this, because we are literally, it's not inexpensive. It's very expensive. And yet heart disease kills more people on the planet than anything. And it's going to take a lot of money to do it. And that's my biggest frustration to date is people will invest $250 million easily in the next version of Xbox.
Guy Kawasaki:
TikTok.
Doris Taylor:
TikTok, whatever, but we need $250 million to build a heart, and we get a pushback from that. And yet no one's sitting there at the end of the day or when they need it going, "Gee, I wish I had spent more on TikTok."
Guy Kawasaki:
There was a moment in that CNN interview, and you said something about, "Oh my God, Sanjay. Now we're at 95 percent in cantebaric cellularity." And I swear to God, Doris, I searched Google high and low and I cannot figure out what the hell. I found Canterbury, but what is cantebaric cellularity?
Doris Taylor:
So, that's interesting. One thing you don't know about me is X number of years ago now, seven years ago now, I had neck cancer. And when I had neck cancer, I had to learn how to talk again. And sometimes I slur some words. So, what I was trying to say there is cadaveric. So, a cadaver. The normal native heart veric cellularity. Trying to say that back to back when you slur sometimes is hard. But that's what I was trying to say. So, thank you for asking me that, because there are probably a lot of people out there going, "What the heck?"
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, you could make the case that the funny thing is those two medical experts from CNN didn't say, "What the hell are you talking about?" They just like, "Oh yeah. Cantebaric cellularity, of course it's 95 percent."
Doris Taylor:
They just let it go right by.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, aren't you impressed that I caught that?
Doris Taylor:
I am. And what you're saying points out is that some of this is shrouded in mystery and the rest of it is really pretty straightforward and simple. And I think that's what makes it magic as well as possible, is it's straightforward, but nature is doing so much of it for us.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Yeah. I mentioned Margaret Atwood and dystopia before. Let me give you another kind of dystopian question here. So, in your lectures and stuff, you show video of heart cells beating, and now these are heart cells not precursors to the organ. These are cells and these cells can beat outside the body. So, now what happens if some politicians see this and they say, "Oh, the heart cell is beating, therefore conception is immediate form of life, and now we cannot have abortions at all because the heart cells are beating." Am I being paranoid or could that happen?
Doris Taylor:
We already know that interpretations of when life begins are a slippery slope that is evolving very rapidly. I will say that I'm a strong believer in a woman's right to choice. And what I've said for twenty-five years is I've always prayed to God that no one I knew needed that choice, and I've always prayed that it would be available if they did. Because the alternative is horrific from a medical point of view as well as from a being alive point of view. That being said, heart sells in a dish beating made me question what's alive. They really did.
But those heart cells don't start beating during development on day one either. So, I personally separate the two. I have the utmost respect for the fact that those cells are alive. That does not mean when I'm growing a heart in a bioreactor and I'm growing a whole heart that's beating in a bioreactor, that does not mean that I've created a person either. And yet, one of the things that we face is every time one of those hearts in a bioreactor dies, it's traumatic. And it really does make you begin to question the definition of living.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So, my last question for you, because really Doris, I've wondered about this my entire life. How do I elongate my telomeres?
Doris Taylor:
Decrease your stress. Honestly.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think you better explain what a telomere is, because I didn't know until twenty-four hours ago.
Doris Taylor:
So, the telomere is a piece of your DNA in your cell that gets shorter every time your cell divides. And when it reaches a certain short link, it signals to the cell, "Oh, you're old. Die." And stem cells, and a lot of the comparative work we do and decreasing inflammation has been shown to actually increase telomere length and stop the shortening of your telomere. So, increase your lifespan. Our goal, however, is not to make everyone live for 200 years. My goal, my personal goal, is to enable people to live healthily until they die. And if that's 120 years, fantastic. I don't think that's unreasonable.
That being said, and being serious now, when we looked at meditation, mindfulness, when we looked at acupuncture, when we looked at exercise, when we looked at a number of different paradigms that we've all been told are good for us and reduce stress, we've also been able to show that they increase circulating stem cells. So, I truly believe that there is a direct correlation between the ability of our body to maintain endogenous internal repair processes and that stress related inflammation. So, if you have to do one thing, decrease stress. It increases the ability of your cells to repair your body long-term.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's good to know. Madisun and I are going to go surfing this afternoon to decrease our stress.
Doris Taylor:
I support that entirely.
Guy Kawasaki:
And increase our telomeres.
Doris Taylor:
I think surfing would increase my stress, but certainly the water would decrease my stress.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes. If you ever get to the Bay Area, we'll try to do both with you.
Doris Taylor:
It's a deal. I'm sure I will in the next year.
Guy Kawasaki:
All right, all right, I will. And then we'll go eat a steak.
Doris Taylor:
From a USDA approved vendor.
Guy Kawasaki:
Actually, we should go eat pork chops.
Doris Taylor:
That's right. That's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
We'll just vertically integrate with the pigs.
Doris Taylor:
Right.
Guy Kawasaki:
And that wraps up this fascinating conversation with Doris Taylor. She's a luminary in the field of cardiovascular regenerative medicine. May it never come to this, but someday if you get a personalized heart, it may be because of her work.
I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. Now with all my heart, I want to thank the Remarkable People team. That would be Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff Sieh, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magaña, Fallon Yates, and the drop-in queen of Santa Cruz, Louisiana, and Bali, Madisun Nuismer. Until next week, Mahalo and Aloha.