Welcome to Chasing Life.

Hibernation.

We've all heard the term and might even think we know what it means.

Bears and squirrels, other animals, hunkering down for the winter,

only to emerge when the warmer weather of spring arrives.

But what if hibernation itself was more complicated than we realized?

His heart rate will go from about 3 beats a minute to upwards of 400 beats per minute

in about 10 minutes.

That's incredible.

And what if hibernators had superpowers that could one day be tapped for humans,

for things like cancer, heart attacks, depression,

and even space travel.

Those are the questions researchers and scientists all over the world are getting closer to answering

every day.

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and this is Chasing Life.

Christopher Gregg is a professor of neurobiology and human genomics at the University of Utah. Do you want any fruit?

No, thanks.

But his work on human genes has led him to a completely different type of mammal, hibernators.

We were trying to crack the code on the genome to find these switches that control our genes.

Our idea was that we could compare the genomes of species with a particular trait against species that didn't have that trait. And we were excited about

traits that were to do with behavior, metabolic control. And as we went through all of the

superpowers that have evolved, hibernation just jumped out at us.

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