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- These rats don't age. Here's why.
These rats don't age. Here's why.
LEVITY podcast episode #28 - with Prof. Rochelle Buffenstein
Peter Ottsjö
September 02, 2025
✅ 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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🏠 Some housekeeping:
✅ LEVITY is back! From now on the newsletter will resume its weekly cadence.
✅ I’m running a bit behind on show notes for the latest podcast episodes, but don’t worry - we’ll get fully caught up in the coming days.
✅ Our new episode with Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine, is live now. Don’t miss it!
✅ Sharp-eyed readers may notice a few subtle visual tweaks in the LEVITY newsletter. Think of them as clues to a larger redesign underway behind the scenes. Soon, LEVITY will have a new look - better aligned with our content, and with the newsletter and podcast more seamlessly integrated. I can’t wait to show you what I’ve built!
Meet the weird mammal that stops aging in its tracks
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.
You can watch the episode below or listen to it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or other places, like PocketCasts. Please follow, like and subscribe! 🙏🏼 This will boost our chances of reaching a bigger audience.
A detailed overview of the episode