为什么有些动物比其他动物活得长?

这个问题问得很好。实际上，我认为我们可以把这和我们刚才谈论的蝙蝠联系起来因为生物学中发生的任何事情的根本原因都是进化。所以如果你看一种动物，比如蝙蝠。蝙蝠和老鼠的大小差不多，它们属于同一科，它们都是非常接近的物种。但你会发现，最长寿的蝙蝠在野外可以活30-40年。然而，如果你在实验室里观察一只老鼠，它们可以活两三年，有些甚至可以活四年。那么，蝙蝠为了活得更久，学会了做什么呢?从进化的角度来看，最重要的是，是什么推动了这种变化。事实上，我认为对蝙蝠来说是因为它们会飞，这不仅仅是因为飞行是一种非常有趣的乐趣，或者它们想继续前进，享受这种生活方式。因为这让它们比老鼠安全得多。想象一下，你是一只老鼠，你正在过你的一天。 There are loads of dangers all in the world around you. There's there's cats that can kill you. There's infectious disease. You're a tiny little animal, so you can just die of exposure. You can just die of being too cold. And what that means is that when evolution is trying to set up your biology, it's not going to put a huge amount of energy into giving you elaborate anticancer defenses, because frankly, by the time you come down with cancer age, maybe two or three years as a mouse, you've probably already been eaten. Whereas if you're a bat, your flying up in the sky, you've got far fewer natural predators. You can fly to a nice warm caves, keep yourself cozy if the weather gets a bit cold. And what that means is evolution has had a lot more chance to evolve these anti-cancer defenses, defenses against heart disease, defenses against things like inflammation, which is one of the sort of molecular biological causes of the aging process. And that means that you can find animals that are surprisingly closely related, but nonetheless have these wildly divergent lifespans. So actually the irony is that the reason that you die of aging is because you can die of other things and the less you die of other things, the more evolution is incentivized to slow down your aging as a species.

哈利:这是一个很好的定义，最后是什么积累起来的。我的想法是，在实验室里，我们知道安德鲁有没有什么物种我们能够减缓普通老鼠或大鼠的衰老?我们能延长生命周期吗

Andrew -很多不同的物种。是的。我们在实验室里使用了各种各样的模式生物。显然他们不是人类，但他们有各种各样的优势来尝试理解基本的生物学。我们已经减缓了线虫的衰老，这些微小的毫米长的蠕虫经常被用于衰老实验，在苍蝇身上，显然在老鼠身上，因为它们是最接近人类的在你开始研究真正大的，难以研究的动物之前，比如猴子。你也可以用老鼠做什么，让我们举个例子。你可以给老鼠服用一种叫做抗衰老药的药物。它们如此命名的原因是它们杀死了衰老的细胞，这是我在书中谈到的衰老的基本潜在原因之一。随着这些细胞的积累，随着年龄的增长，它们基本上加速了衰老过程。所以我们的想法是，通过服用这些药物中的一种，你可以杀死衰老细胞，但留下小鼠体内其余的细胞，或者希望将来在人体中完好无损。 And what that means is you basically make those mice biologically younger. So we gave these drugs to mice that were aged about 24 months, and obviously we just mentioned, mice are much shorter life span than we do, so that is sort of 70 ish in human years. And even though these mice are very old and they received the treatment, they basically got biologically younger. They lived a bit longer, but they didn't just live longer in ill health sort of stumbling along, unable to summon up the energy to die. They've got fewer diseases, they've got less cancer, they've got less heart disease, they got fewer cataracts and it wasn't just the diseases. They were less frail. They could run further and faster on the little mousy treadmills they used in these experiments. They always send the mice down the gym to sort of test their frailty. They were more curious. If you've got an old mouse in a maze and its anxious, maybe just a bit lazy, doesn't want to explore. And by removing these senescent cells, you could rejuvenate some of that youthful curiosity. And honestly, these mice just look great. I'm a computational biologist by training so I have never dealt with any actual animals in the lab. But even to my untrained eye, these mice look fantastic. They've got better fur, they've got better skin. They just look amazing.