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Podcast: New Books In Public Health
Episode: Steven N. Austad, "Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives" (MIT Press, 2022)
Description: Opossums in the wild don't make it to the age of three; our pet cats can live for a decade and a half; cicadas live for seventeen years (spending most of them underground). Whales, however, can live for two centuries and tubeworms for several millennia. Meanwhile, human life expectancy tops out around the mid-eighties, with some outliers living past 100 or even 110. Is there anything humans can learn from the exceptional longevity of some animals in the wild? In Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives (MIT Press, 2022), Steven Austad tells the stories of some ex...