✅ Introduction to episode 28 with Prof. Rochelle Buffenstein. ✅ All you ever wanted to know about the naked mole-rat. ✅ Detailed show notes. ✅ No Gompertz slope. ✅ Winning the fight against the hallmarks of aging.

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The naked mole-rat, ugly though it may be, is the envy of the longevity world. Its risk of death barely changes with time; it shrugs off cancer, stays fertile for decades and seems to skip every hallmark of aging that hobbles the rest of us.

But why? What evolutionary forces gave a mouse-sized, subterranean rodent near-immunity to aging - and what can its biology teach us about extending healthy human life?

Comparative biologist Prof. Rochelle Buffenstein - who has maintained the world’s largest captive colonies and authored 200+ papers - joins the LEVITY podcast to dissect the evidence.

In this episode:

✅ Rochelle’s journey: from Zimbabwe farm kid to the pre-eminent naked mole-rat researcher.

✅ Eusocial society: queens, worker castes and lethal succession battles.

✅ No Gompertz slope: hard numbers that show mortality risk stays essentially flat for 40 years.

✅ Cancer resistance → high-molecular-weight hyaluronan, unusual immune cell profiles.

✅ Telomere maintenance and DNA-methylation reversal.

✅ Proteostasis on easy-mode: slow translation, durable proteins, super-charged autophagy.

✅ What actually kills a mole-rat?

✅ Translational angles: small-molecule screens, CRISPR edits, and why funding is still an uphill battle.

✅ Other long-lived species worth studying - and how young scientists can break into comparative gerontology.

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A detailed overview of the episode