How Long Does a Population of Animals Live?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In any one population of animals, what's remarkably consistent actually is the shape of this curve. So you can have a hundred animals, and maybe around day ten, some of one animalsart will die. But out o day 30, there'll still be one animal alive. And so that sort of models be sevin a population where you can have individuals with an average life span of the population - but they could live to 95 or 70. Is it the similar thing for our little round worms? Yes, absolutely. They all have the same geno. It's hard to know at that ay which ones are going to be long lived and which ones are short lived. What are the things

Aging -- everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundworm, with an eye to extending its lifespan as well as figuring out exactly what processes take place when we age. In this episode we contemplate what scientists have learned about aging, and the prospects for ameliorating its effects -- or curing it altogether? -- even in human beings. Coleen Murphy received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University, and is currently Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics at Princeton. Home page at the Lewis-Sigler Institute Lab web page Princeton Profile Google Scholar publication page Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.