And if they burn it slow like an elephant, they can live much longer than that. And if they burn it fast, they'll be short-lived, like mice. Let's say all mammals have a kind of a fixed amount of energy that they can burn over the course of a lifetime. The is that life is inherently destructive and that burning energy is inherently destructive. I've spent a good deal of my career trying to kill it, but obviously, I haven't been able to. What is the billion beats hypothesis and why do you question it? But there are exceptions, and actually I think the exceptions are the ones that are most interesting from a scientific perspective. We know that smaller ones are shorter-lived and bigger ones are longer-lived. It's true of almost every group of animals. So, are size and lifespan linked in animals or not? I had to recapture them every month, and I would come upon one that was in prime physical health, and two months later it would have cataracts, and it would have lost muscles, and had parasites all over it, and arthritis. And this just seemed to grossly violate that. So you know, a dog has a longer life than a mouse, and a horse has a longer life than a dog, and an elephant has a longer life than a horse. I think we all have this kind of intuitive feel from being around animals that smaller animals are going to shorter lives. It was the size and the longevity combination. And that was so puzzling to me that I completely abandoned what I was working on. I discovered that they age really quickly, almost like mice. We were working on some animals in South America - opossums. How did opossums' short life span get you interested in longevity? For the first year, I never took a day off. But I just love the intimate contact with them. They're almost like dogs, more like dogs than cats, except they sometimes will try to kill you. What I liked the most about lions is because they live in social groups, they like contact. So I decided to study animals in graduate school. After I got fairly seriously injured one time, I thought maybe this is not really what I want to do the rest of my life. When I got down there, the movie producer offered me a job and I said, "You understand I don't know anything at all about this, right?" And he said, "that's okay." It awakened my interest in animals and what makes animals tick. He got an offer to use them in a movie, and he needed somebody to help him transport them from Portland to Hollywood. And a friend of mine had a couple of African lions for pets, because he was crazy. I was a reporter for the Oregonian newspaper in Portland. How did you go from lion taming for the movies to studying aging? This interview has been edited for clarity and length. There's no immortality on the horizon - or anything close to it - but it's likely science can eventually lengthen our lives by at least a little, Austad says. Austad spoke with Invisibilia's Lulu Miller to discuss what science has uncovered about animal aging processes, and how researchers might be able to use what they've learned to extend human lifespans.
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