On May 20, 2025, AFAR Scientific Director Steven N. Austad, PhD, and Irving Wright Award winner S. Jay Olshansky, PhD, were featured on the premiere episode of Season 6 of the Aventine podcast The World as You’ll Know It, titled The World as You’ll Know It: The Future of Aging, with host Carl Zimmer, science columnist for The New York Times.
The episode highlighted the friendly wager between Dr. Austad and Dr. Olshansky on the limits of human lifespan, specifically whether anyone born before 2001 will reach the age of 150.
In addition to being AFAR’s Scientific Director, Dr. Austad is the 2011 Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction winner and the Inaugural George M. Martin Award winner. He is the founding director of UAB’s Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging, and co-director of the UAB Integrative Center for Aging Research, as well as the Co-Principal Investigator of the Nathan Shock Centers Coordinating Center.
Dr. Olshansky is the 2016 Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction winner, a Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Research Associate at the Center on Aging at the University of Chicago and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as well as the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Lapetus Solutions, Inc.
Listen to the episode, “The Billion-Dollar Bet: Will Humans Live to 150?” here.
For more insights watch our webinar, “How Realistic is a 100-Year Life Expectancy and Why Does it Matter?” featuring Dr. Olshansky and economist Andrew J. Scott, DPhil, in dialogue with AFAR Scientific Director Dr. Austad, here.
