Replay: Steven Austad shares Five Things He's Learned about What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
"Why can’t nature, which is so successful at producing healthy adults from single fertilized eggs, do the seemingly much simpler task of keeping that adult healthy through time? Why do some animals like mice age quickly, while others – like bats, birds, whales, and people – age slower? Why do so many animals benefit from natural aging strategies that are even better than those we humans have?"
– Steven Austad, Five Things I’ve Learned about What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives
Steve Austad is Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the inaugural holder of the UAB Protective Life Endowed Chair in Healthy Aging. He is also the author of the just-released Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives. Here’s the first five minutes of our recent 90-minute class in which Steven shares the Five Things He’s Learned from researching the lives of animals in the wild about human health and our own aging process.
Five Things I’ve Learned about What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives dives deep into the leading research on the reasons animals (including humans) age, and explains the science behind some animals’ exceptional longevity in the wild. His conversation with Kris Rebillot is part of our ongoing series, Five Things I’ve Learned about Living Better Longer. These 90-minute sessions share the insights, perspectives, and experiences of renowned researchers and scientists devoted to exploring the ways in which we age and to applying their knowledge to improve our lives.
If you’re eager to discover the insights we need to make the most of the possibilities that await us as we age, this conversation is for you.
Steven’s early research was in the field. His work took him to in several parts of the United States, Venezuela, East Africa, Micronesia, and Papua New Guinea. His interest in the biology of aging made his research more laboratory based. His lab works on exotic species, like clams that live more than 500 years, and hydra that don’t age at all, in order to discover treatments that could benefit human-kind. In addition to Methuselah's Zoo, Steven is the author of Why We Age: What Science is Discovering about the Body’s Journey through Life, Real People Don’t Own Monkeys.
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