Aging may be on your mind this week. And it's an often overlooked aspect of planning for retirement. Coleen T. Murphy, a leading scholar of aging, and the author of How We Age: The Science of Longevity, details how recent research on model systems, combined with breakthroughs in genomic methods, have allowed scientists to probe the molecular mechanisms of longevity and aging, This research is helping us understand the fundamental biological rules that govern aging - and it may be bringing us closer to extending healthspans and slowing the effects of aging.

She joins us here in Princeton, New Jersey.

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Bio
Coleen T. Murphy is professor of genomics and molecular biology at Princeton University. She is director of Princeton's Glenn Foundation for Research on Aging and director of the Simons Collaboration on Plasticity in the Aging Brain. She is director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories For Aging Research at Princeton.

Murphy completed a B.S. with honors in biochemical and biophysical sciences at the University of Houston and earned a Ph.D. at Stanford University. She was awarded a graduate fellowship at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and completed her postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco.

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For More on Coleen T. Murphy

How We Age: The Science of Longevity

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

Why We Remember – Charan Ranganath

How Not to Age – Dr. Michael Greger

The Mindful Body – Ellen Langer

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Wise Quotes

On Why We Age

"I think if the better question is why wouldn't we age? Like in the entire universe, entropy is at work. So things fall apart and unless you put in energy to repair them, those things will fall apart. So we're no different, but just we're better at repairing all of our cells and tissues and everything else when we're young, right? My kids, if they get a cut, it heals up in like two days. And if I do, it doesn't. So we see those repair processes decline with age. And so that's really why we age because the amount that our body's put into repair actually gets overwhelmed at some point."

On Cognitive Aging

"So, by studying processes that change with age, my lab is extremely interested in cognitive aging. So we want to make that extend as long as possible. Even if it didn't extend lifespan, if we found a mechanism to maintain your cognitive function as long as possible, that would be super valuable for all of us. And so, that's what we're talking about when we're talking about healthspan. A lot of these age -related diseases that we care about in humans and then we understand the molecular mechanisms so that we can find ways to extend that in humans as well...Can we actually extend the you know the time of normal cognitive function? And it turns out we've been able to uncover pathways that do control that. So I'm really excited about some work that we did where we you know we found some we found a genetic pathway where if we flipped on just one protein made it more active in one neuron of the cell. Admittedly they have hardly any neurons - they have only 302. But this particular neuron is one that's really important for regulating their memory and we turn that on a super old worm and it rescued their memory. Nobody really cares until you show it in a mouse. And so we collaborated with friends of ours at UCSF and they put in into the hippocampus so the brain of the two -year -old mice. So that's like a 75 to 80 year old person. They put in the same activated protein in these it. rescue their memory. So that shows that we can use these pathways to find something in worms and apply it to mammals. And by the way, that protein is exactly the same in mice and humans. So that gives us sort of a way into this problem where we could start to address it pharmaceutically. So that's an example. I don't think it's the only way.