Hi, I’m Aastha, and welcome to Live Longer World, where I interview scientists researching the frontiers of longevity science and write about health & longevity practices.
The standard “wear and tear” story of aging may be incomplete. Dr. Peter Lidsky—a virologist and evolutionary biologist argues that aging is programmed. He says aging can be an adaptive strategy for controlling pathogens, a concept he calls the “pathogen control hypothesis.”
In this episode, we dig into the evidence behind this idea, the immune system in aging, and what his theory means for longevity interventions.
Timestamps below cover the topics discussed well.
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Timestamps:
0:00 — Aging ≠ Wear-and-Tear
3:44 — The Case for Programmed Aging
8:48 — Why Program Aging at All?
11:09 — The Pathogen-Control Hypothesis
14:26 — Why We Get “Sick Time”
24:37 — Rising Lifespans, Explained
27:36 — Bowhead Whales’ Longevity Edge
31:15 — Why Lone Animals Don’t Live Forever
34:00 — Planaria: The “Immortal” Worm
35:00 — Do Infections Speed Up Aging?
36:46 — When Immunity Starts to Slide
38:17 — Why Fertility Has a Deadline
42:49 — Extending Life via the Immune System
1:00:35 — How Honey Bees Rejuvenate
1:10:50 — Can We Tackle Aging? Healthspan to 90s+
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DNA Damage & Aging | Dr. Bjorn Schumacher
“DNA is the blueprint of life..And it’s really surprising how unstable the DNA is. It inflicts tens of thousands of lesions every single day. Every single cell in our body experiences about a 100,000 DNA lesions everyday, so it’s constantly occurring. It’s a fact of life that DNA is damaged and requires constant repair. And there are distinct repair mechanisms and when they fail people can age in an extremely accelerated fashion."
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