Rats, Cats and Bats: What the Natural World Can Teach Us About Improving Health and Extending Life

• Why is it that the life of a mayfly spans a day, a fly lives only one week, a dog a decade, a human a century and a tree a millennium or two?
  
• Why do salmon live only a few years, reproduce and then die within a few days while turtles get better with age?
  
• How can understanding other species’ rates of aging allow for alterations into the human lifespan?

Exciting research is taking place in a variety of species, from yeast to our nearest animal relatives, the primates. Through such work, researchers are expanding their theories of how and why we age and are beginning to develop therapeutic or treatment models that may modify aging in these other life forms, in the hopes of finding similar treatments for the diseases of human aging.

The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) held a luncheon discussion on the topic on October 18, 2006, featuring Steven Austad, PhD, Professor, Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Research and the Department of Cellular and Structural Biology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

As part of AFAR’s Why We Age scientists-media luncheon series, we explore various topics related to the biology of aging featuring scientists from some of the leading academic institutions in the nation.

For more information about this research, please visit our consumer web site Infoaging (www.infoaging.org). An interview with Dr. Austad can be found at http://websites.afar.org/site/PageServer?pagename=IA_expert_Austad

Funding for the media luncheon series was made possible through an unrestricted educational grant from Pfizer Inc.

Dr. Steven Austad