The World as You'll Know It
A Podcast About the Forces Shaping Our Future
We are living through years of enormous change, when the time between cause and effect is ever shrinking. We can’t predict the future, but we can get a better handle on what’s happening right now, and how these disruptions may shape the years to come.
This season of The World as You’ll Know It goes inside the science of human longevity. Thanks to vaccines and other public health measures, we have already added 30 years to our average life expectancy since 1900. Scientists are now looking at new approaches to living longer, living healthier and maybe even curing aging itself. Hosted by Carl Zimmer, science columnist for The New York Times, we meet the scientists, researchers and economists on the frontier of this human development and look deeply as issues like cognition, biohacking, Alzheimer's and how we remake society to light of this profound shift.
Previous seasons of the podcast explored the promise of green technology, the perils of artificial intelligence, the latest advancements in brain science, the role of technology in society and the long-term social and economic effects of Covid-19.
The World as You’ll Know It is brought to you by Aventine, a non-profit research institute creating and sharing work that explores how today’s decisions could affect the future. The views expressed are those of the participants and do not represent those of Aventine, its employees or affiliates.
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Season Six: The Future of Aging
Human beings are living longer than ever. Thanks to advances like vaccines, antibiotics, pasteurized milk and clean water, we’ve added more than 30 years to the average lifespan over the last 120 years. That’s more than was added in the previous 10,000 years combined. More recently, enormous progress has been made in our treatment of deadly conditions like heart disease and cancer, with mortality rates for each dropping by double digits. Now science is tackling a new challenge: Can we cure aging itself? In pursuit of this holy grail, longevity research has gone from a sleepy backwater to a multi billion dollar field, populated — yes — by plenty of hucksters, but also by Nobel laureates. The goal is to find out what causes us to age and what we can do to slow it down, or maybe even reverse it altogether. Could tweaking the right molecule buy us 20 more years, or are we maxed out? Can older brains be re-wired to function like younger brains? Do any so-called biohacks actually work? These are some of the questions we are tackling in this season of The World as You’ll Know It: The Future of Aging. With leading scientists in the fields of biology, neuroscience and medicine, we’ll look at the cutting-edge of aging research and what living longer could mean for all of us.