Today on the show, why do some of us age faster than others? Why do some of us grow old and die before our time while others seem to simply endure? And most of us have probably wondered at one point or another, which track am I on?

Turns out it might be possible to predict the whole trajectory of an animal's life at a surprisingly young age, just by looking closely at subtle patterns of behavior. That's the conclusion of a new study from researchers at the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience here at Wu Tsai Neuro, out March 12, 2026 in the journal Science.

The study focused on the African turquoise killifish, a little fish that lives fast and dies young. This species has one of the shortest lifespans of any vertebrate, which makes it ideal for studying the entire arc of a life in the laboratory setting.

The important point here is that even short-lived killifish are dealt different lots by the fates. Even when you control for genetics and the environment, some killifish only live a month or two, while others can live as long as a year. So the big question is, what drives this difference in longevity?

To learn more, we're joined today by the study's two lead researchers, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Postdoctoral Scholars, Claire Bedbrook and Ravi Nath, who performed the research in the labs of Anne Brunet and Karl Deisseroth here at Stanford.

Learn More

To study aging, researchers give killifish the CRISPR treatment (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2023)
Study pinpoints key mechanism of brain aging (Stanford Report, 2025)
Killifish project explores the genetic foundation of longevity (Stanford Medicine 2015)
Multi-tissue transcriptomic aging

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Why do some of us age faster than others? | Claire Bedbrook and Ravi Nath

From Our Neurons to Yours

Why do some of us age faster than others? | Claire Bedbrook and Ravi Nath