We know so much about biology nowadays, so why is it currently so difficult to figure out how to make a person live longer?

I mean, we know how to do this in worms and often in mice, but why is the study of extending lifespans so hard in humans?

Why are there so few companies studying this? And what is the future of longevity research? And what would

it be like to live a much longer life.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sailed deeply into our three-pound universe to uncover some of the most surprising aspects of our lives.

Yeah. the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode reaches beyond neurobiology to our biology more generally, and specifically

about whether we could live a lot longer if we just understood

which of the billions of tiny molecular signals in a cell mattered for the aging process

and which ones we could grab a hold of and tweak and how the whole network might shift in a way

that keeps everything young and optimized.

It's often said that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes.

But it turns out, the third certainty is that people will put in a lot of work to avoid

those two things. So today's episode is about the

endeavor of living longer. This is not about immortality, in other words, never dying. Instead,

this is about longevity, increasing your lifespan. So to introduce today's topic, I'm going to read a short story that I wrote

some years ago and originally read on BBC radio. I have been asked to speak here at the funeral

of a 122-year-old. As many of you know, I have been asked to speak not only because of my expertise in the

history of aging, but also because she is a distant relative. She is my great, great, great, great

granddaughter. Her death is tragic to us, not only because she has died so young, but because she was

haunted her whole life by an incurable blood disorder and was well aware that she would not

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