#9 - Studying Longevity with Morgan Levine

Frontiers

Today I’m speaking with Morgan Levine. Morgan is an assistant professor at Yale’s Pathology department and runs a lab that aims to discover both the mechanisms that drive aging and interventions to slow or reverse that process. The lab also develops tools to measure biological age, which we will get into in our discussion of epigenetic clocks.

Aging has long been assumed to be our insurmountable human fate. But as research of the past years has uncovered aging’s malleability in some model organisms, the hope to slow or reverse the aging process in humans has become an increasingly attractive goal. And given that age is the greatest risk factor for developing many of the most common lethal diseases today, longevity research could potentially be extremely impactful both for prolonged health- and lifespans.

Morgan and I don’t go super deep into the science as I try to get a broad overview of the field and some of its structural challenges—but you can learn more about epigenetic clocks in the show notes linked below.

=> Shownotes