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296 turns · 1 hr 29 minEvolution never works in a single gene. Evolution works in a whole genome. I
think we can bypass 120. We studied bowhead whale, which is the longest living mammal. They live over 200 years. We
need to do some more drastic interventions.
We wanted to understand the molecular mechanism behind the cancer resistance of naked moras because they almost never get cancer.
There is a new drug that's going to be developed.
Most diseases of modern society are related to age, and the incidence increases exponentially as people get older. I'm very optimistic about that we can improve human lifespan and health span. Right now, I would focus on lifestyle changes, but the more you know, the more power it gives you. 20-year-olds get very few diseases, not those chronic diseases. Those start to pick up as we get into our 50s, 60s, 70s.
Be very careful not to overdo it. There is a huge need that people want to take some kind of silver bullet. And unfortunately, we don't have
it. Now we are happy with 10%, but what about 100%?
You spent your career studying animals that live an exceptionally long time and are typically, and correct me if I'm wrong, free from disease and illness. So they're living a long and healthy life. And I think when we think about this term longevity, really that's what we all want, right? And so we want to not only live longer, but we want those extra years to be full of health, right? And that's not happening right now. And I think we're spending, I think, around a fifth of our lives suffering from some form of comorbidities. And so I think what's really frightening for most people when they think about getting older is this concept that they will gradually, if not quite quickly, decline cognitively, physically, and their capacity to live a good life will diminish. And so what is it about... these animal models that is allowing them to not only live long but live healthy
well there is a very strong selection for it because if imagine you are a bot and it needs to catch insects yeah so the moment it cannot fly it will not survive any longer so it has to stay really fit to survive Humans, well, we are free from these pressures of selection, so we start to accumulate maybe some undesirable genetic mutations. So this is one part of it. But the second part, we are living maybe way past the age that prehistoric humans would live. So if you also take an old bat and start hand feeding it, you can probably keep it alive even longer. So I think it's a combination of these two factors. So first of all, we don't live the healthiest lifestyle, and then we live way longer. And what we can learn from these animals that, yeah, there are bats that live more than 40 years, but the tiny creature, it's amazing. So whatever adaptations we find with them, so these are adaptations for healthy life because they're under such a strong pressure from, you know, the environment where they need to survive.
But is that not the case for all animals other than humans? You know, why would one naked mole rat live longer than a mouse?
Well, I think what's true for all animals is that they live in fairly harsh realities, so they need to survive, they need to stay fit. But some of
Episode notes
What is aging? Why is it the single biggest predictor of disease? And which of the most talked-about anti-aging interventions — telomere extension, biological age tests, supplements — actually hold up?
In this conversation we talk to Dr. Vera Gorbunova and Dr. Andrei Seluanov who run a research lab together at the University of Rochester where they study the biology of aging across dozens of long-lived species — from naked mole rats to bowhead whales.
A naked mole rat is roughly the size of a mouse but can live past 40 years — more than ten times a mouse's lifespan — and almost never develops tumors. Gorbunova and Seluanov's lab traced that resistance to a single molecule, and when they engineered mice to produce it, those mice developed about 50% fewer tumors and lived 10–15% longer.
The same lab has also found a seaweed compound that extended mouse lifespan by 15%, studies a 200-year-old whale that carries 100 times more of a specific DNA-repair protein than humans do, and recently found that controlling a stretch of the genome once dismissed as "junk" nearly doubled the reproductive lifespan of mice.
In this episode you'll learn:
• What aging actually is, and why it happens in the first place
- Why naked mole rats almost never get cancer — and the clogged lab-vacuum tube that led to the discovery
• Why a naked mole rat gene cut tumors in half in mice and