Episode Details

“A few years ago, I might have chuckled at the naiveté of this question, but now it's not so crazy to think that we will be able to take some sort of medicine to extend our healthy lifespans in the foreseeable future.”—Coleen Murphy

Transcript with external links

Eric Topol (00:06):

Hello, this is Eric Topol from Ground Truths, and I'm just so delighted to have with me Professor Coleen Murphy, who has written this exceptional book, How We Age: The Science of Longevity. It is a phenomenal book and I'm very eager to discuss it with you, Coleen.

Coleen Murphy (00:25):

Thanks for having me on.

Eric Topol (00:27):

Oh yeah. Well, just so everyone who doesn't know Professor Murphy, she's at Princeton. She's the Richard Fisher Preceptor in Integrative Genomics, the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton, and director of the Paul Glenn Laboratories for Aging Research. Well, obviously you've been in this field for decades now, even though you're still very young. The classic paper that I can go back to would be in Nature 2003 with the DAF-16 and doubling the lifespan of C. elegans or better known as a roundworm. Would that be the first major entry you had?

Coleen Murphy (01:17):

Yeah, that was my postdoctoral work with Cynthia Kenyon.

Eric Topol (01:20):

Right, and you haven't stopped since you've been on a tear and you’ve put together a book which has a hundred pages of references in a small font. I don't know what the total number is, but it must be a thousand or something.

Coleen Murphy (01:35):

Actually, it's just under a thousand. That's right.

Eric Topol (01:37):

That's a good guess.

Coleen Murphy (01:38):

Good guess. Yeah.

Eric Topol (01:39):

So, because I too have a great interest in this area, I found just the resource that you've put together as extraordinary in terms of the science and all the work