I'm Steve Strogetz, and this is The Joy of Water, a podcast from Quantum Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in science and math today.

In this episode, we're going to be talking about aging. Why exactly do we age? What's happening at the cellular level as our bodies get older?

Scientists are still chasing many of the answers, but there have been some important advances

in understanding the distinctive changes we call aging.

Someday, that progress might not only help us live longer, but live better, too. After all, living many years may not be much of a bargain if it means suffering from diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.

We'll ask what role do our genes play in aging?

And why do women tend to live longer than men on average? And also, what is research finding out

about the ways we might slow down the process of aging? Later in this episode, we'll be hearing

from Dr. Dina DuBall, Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology at the Wile Institute

for Neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

But first, joining me now is Dr. Judith Campesi, a biochemist and cell biologist and professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

Her lab there focuses on cellular senescence, a concept that we'll be unpacking very shortly.

She is co-editor-in-chief of the Aging Journal.

Judy, thanks so much for joining us today.

My pleasure.

I'm very excited to be talking to you about this.

Well, of course, all of us are getting older, and we all feel it.

It raises so many questions,

though, like, why is it happening? Is it something that nature is doing on purpose? Is it that

our bodies are kind of wearing out like an old machine? Or how should we think about it?

I think the way we have to think about it is in the context of evolution. If you think about humans, our lifespan,

over the course of our evolution, aging never happened. There was no Parkinson's disease,

...