Sure.

How could we think about the, the, the biomedicine of prevention.

That's thinking about age as, as a process, as a risk factor.

And as soon as you start to think about, oh, could we modify aging as a, as a process, whether it's through exercise, diet or, or a wonder drug yet to be discovered, that has a kinda ick feeling for people.

People are suddenly like, "Ooh, we don't wanna do that." We honest- we'd love to cure Alzheimer's disease because we don't want people to suffer from Alzheimer's disease.

We'd love to cure cancer, but we wanna do that so we're just, we're just entrained to do that through a kind of curative medical point of view.

If you think about, well, there's a way to maybe cure or delay the onset of those diseases by thinking about aging, suddenly that becomes kind of, well, that's...

Okay.

But the reason worms like these are such special test subjects, he tells me, is that they only have about 300 neurons, and that makes them like tiny computers, really easy to genetically reprogram.

There's a bit of a debate in the field whether it's 300 or 302.

This is how nerdy we are about this.

We've, we've moved to this.

But we can take the energy sensor, which senses low energy and is turned on when you don't eat, and make that consistently on.

And now even if it eats a lot of food, it doesn't realize it's having a lot of food, and it lives a long time.

It has the, the lifespan of a diet restricted animal.

And when I ask him why...

[laughs]

We, we've moved to this.

But we can take the energy sensor which senses low energy and is turned on when you don't eat, and make that consistently on.

And now even if it eats a lot of food, it doesn't realize it's having a lot of food, and it lives a long time.

It has the, the lifespan of a diet restricted animal.

And we can even show, we can map that down to two neurons in the brain, and we could flip it on and off and get back this longevity.

So there's this huge interaction.

And when I ask him why...