Speaker 2
Hello my friends. The conversation you're about to listen to features doctor morgan levin, a founding principal investigator at altos labs, a new biotechnology company focused on the development of cellular rejuvenation technology. Altos labs has been in the press quite a bit recently for bringing together pioneers of epigenetics, epigenetic clocks and tissue re programming. Doctor levine, as an expert in the field of epigenetics, brings much to the table here, which i suspect should make this episode an enjoyable one for many. Doctor levine's research background is in the study of epigenetic aging, with the goal of trying to understand the underlying mechanisms that cause aging. To paraphrase doctor levine, epigenetics, in many ways, is the operating system of the cell. While all f ourselves essentially have the same d and a, the epigenetic programme is largely what imbues ourselves with their identity, whether that's a skin cell or a neuron. This programme, which gets rewritten as we age, also gives ourselves characteristics that differentiate them from those of a younger person, such as the ability to withstand stress and more so important to recognize that our epigenetics respond, at least to some degree to environmental inputs, in other words, to how we live. A word of advice, if avoiding unnecessary epigenetic age acceleration is your goal, avoid harmful habits like smoking in particular, and prioritise keeping a healthy body weight. These too may be big smoking guns when it comes to accelerated epigenetic aging. In this episode, doctor levine and i discuss how aging is defined, what the hall marks of aging are, and what doctor levine thinks may be the key drivers of aging, what epigenetic aging means, how it is measured by different types of epigenetic clocks, and how these different clocks can be used for different predictive purposes, such as identifying chronological age, biological age and even time to death, why some people age faster or slower than others, how levin's pino age epigenetic aging clock can quanify that, and how that compares to other clinical bio markers used to measure biological aging.