There are numerous ways to try to unlock the mysteries of aging.

You could study long-lived individuals like centenarians and super-sentenarians, particularly

long-lived smokers, perhaps, to uncover the secrets to their resilience.

Or you could go in the opposite direction and study short-lived to people.

Tragic, accelerated aging syndromes like progeria, where children age at eight to ten times

at normal rate, wrinkling, balding, and then typically dying around age 13 of a heart attack or stroke.

Or you could study long-lived animals.

There are mammals such as the bowhead whale that can live hundreds of years.

There are oysters and clams whose hearts can beat over a billion times over its five-century

lifespan.

What accounts for the 10,000-fold range of lifespan in the animal kingdom?

Most of the aging pathways identified as the hallmarks of aging were established using

so-called model organisms, such as yeast, worms, flies, and mice, simpler species

that may nonetheless offer insights due to the remarkable conservation

of common aging mechanisms through the eons of evolutionary time.

Aging used to be considered simply too complex to study, a constellation of internal and external

influences too complicated to disentangle.

But then the game-changer.

The discovery that a single gene mutation could dramatically prolong the lifespan and

youthful state of a tiny worm known as C. Elegans.

Sea Elegans has since wormed its way deep into the study of longevity. It seems we shared a common ancestor about half billion years ago, and to this day we still share

about half their genes.

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