Humans vs. Animals: Longevity Genetics | Lifespan Rewind Episode #2

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]We've got organisms that have learned how to live a lot longer than we do.

[00:00:03]Right. Well, we're essentially upright whales. That sounds crazy, but at the molecular level, if you look at the biochemistry, we're only separated by 40 million years, which is a blink of an eye in geological time. We actually could live as long as whales. There's not that much difference between us. And a whale lives We know bowhead whales can live for hundreds of years. Like more than 200 years. We now have the genome of these animals, and we can see that they have multiple copies of what we call longevity genes, some of which we discovered when I was in my 20s. These are genes that protect the body.

[00:00:37]Longevity genes actually get turned on by adversity, and there are ways we can tweak them. But whales naturally have multiple copies and higher levels of these longevity protective mechanisms, and the bristlecone pine has just whopping amounts.