We’re Getting Longevity All Wrong | Professor Colen Murphy

Benjamin Hopkins (0:05)

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's a real treat and thrilled to have you on.

Coleen Murphy (0:09)

My pleasure.

Benjamin Hopkins (0:10)

When it comes to longevity, what do you think the biggest misconception is?

Coleen Murphy (0:14)

I think right now the biggest misconception is that we already know everything, and therefore, what exists now for people to do or things to take is like the answer. I think that people don't realize this is such an active area of research, and that it takes so long to make it from an academic setting into what's available to the public, that I think people should keep paying attention because the landscape is going to change.

Benjamin Hopkins (0:41)

It's much like tech, where you could spend three years building on one thing, and a update overnight can make that one thing redundant pretty quick. How did you get into the field of longevity? How did you get here?

Coleen Murphy (0:51)

Yeah, so my training was actually in biophysics and biochemistry, and as a graduate student, I'd worked on really deeply understanding the interaction between two proteins, the myosin muscle protein and the actin that it interacts with.

At the end of my graduate work, I realized I really want to step back and ask really broad question, and aging is really broad question. You can attack it from a lot of different angles.

Probably everyone knows, but there's all kinds of different questions in aging. Even from a scientific point of view, you can address it in many different angles. So that really appealed to me and the thought that you could make a difference for a lot of people because if you're lucky enough to live long enough to experience aging, then there can be a lot of medical problems that come along with that. So if you want to be really effective, you would slow down the root cause of all that at once, rather than trying to attack a bunch of different things. So that's how I liked was thinking about it. Then I was lucky enough to hear Cynthia Kenyon speak, and she is just amazing, and her work was kind of revolutionary for the field, because she discovered that you could make single changes, like a single gene change in a small organism, and it would double its lifespan. Right there, that shifts the question from looking at things as they age to, how can we understand the regulatory mechanisms that control how we age? So I joined her lab as a postdoc, and I used the technology that was just coming around right then to be able to look at basically every transcriptional change that happened in those longevity mutants. So then we really understood things better. Then a couple of years later, I started my own lab where I became, I was already less interested in maximizing how long animals could live, instead asking a question, can we improve quality of life? So when I started my lab here at Princeton in 2005, we immediately started asking, could we still use this small model system, the nematode C elegans, to ask questions about reproductive aging, which is the first human aging phenotype, and it happens in women in their mid-30s. Separately, could we really try to understand cognitive aging, which sounds like a crazy thing to ask in worms, but we developed learning, short-term memory, and long-term memory assays in C elegans. But in the time since, we've been able to now extend to showing we could improve memory in C elegans and use the exact same protein in mice. We could rescue memory in really old mice, two-year-old mice that are like 70 to 80-year-old humans. That's the trajectory of how I started thinking about aging and then the way we've been able to extend it into things that we really care about in humans.

Benjamin Hopkins (3:29)

Wonderful.

I think it was two years ago when you wrote your book, How We Age The Science of Longevity. I think it was two years ago, is that right?

Coleen Murphy (3:36)

Yeah, that's when it came out. I spent a long time writing it because it was based on a class that I taught, where we looked at literature from all over the field, not just stuff that my lab does.

Of course, it came out in 2023, and then this field is rapidly moving. There's always new things that I would like to include. At some point, I will have to write an updated version. The basics are still the same, but there's always new things to add.

Benjamin Hopkins (4:01)

Okay, great. Can you walk us through the basics you speak about or you write about in the book?