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0:00
My name is
João Pedro de Magalhães.
And I'm a Senior Lecturer
at University of Liverpool,
where I lead Integrative Genomics
of Ageing Group.
And our research focuses
on understanding
the genetic cellular, molecular
mechanisms of aging,
in particular,
using high-throughput approaches.
And this lecture will focus
on different omics approaches
and large-scale data analysis,
and how these have been applied
in aging research.
0:25
So after a brief introduction,
I'll discuss several technical
and methodological platforms
that are available to study aging
from different perspectives,
and then I'll also discuss
data analysis, data integration,
and network biology approaches,
or how to make sense
of all the data
that's being generated.
0:45
And I'll start by telling you
the story of Qin Shi Huang.
He was the first emperor
of the Qin dynasty in China
over 2,000 years ago.
He was a very wealthy
and powerful man.
He ordered construction
of the Terracotta Army
to protect his mausoleum.
But he didn't want
to grow old and die
and so he ordered
the court physicians at that time
to discover or develop
an elixir of youth.
And they came up
with these small pills
that he was to take every day
that would allow him
to live forever,
or so they claimed.
Now unfortunately for him,
the key ingredient of those pills
was mercury,
which we now know is toxic.
And so sadly and ironically,
he died of mercury poisoning.
Now the reason I tell the story is,
first of all, it shows that
from the beginning of time,
we've wanted to avert
age-related degeneration
and extend our lives,
but also, and most importantly,
it shows that
what we can achieve in a given time
depends on
our current technological progress.
If I wanted to build an iPhone
50 years ago,
I could put all the money
in the world into it,
I would not have been able to do it
in a timely fashion.
And what I hope
to convince you today
is that there are a huge amount
of very exciting
and very powerful technologies
that we can use to study aging,
that I believe will allow us
to gain insight
into the aging process
in a way that's never
been possible before.
