Bret Weinstein

With me so far?

Yep.

Okay.

What I realized more than 25 years ago, many people who've heard you and me talk before will have heard us talk about my work on telomeres.

So telomeres, you'll remember, are structures at the end of every chromosome that are not genes.

They are repetitive sequences.

They're written in DNA, but it's basically just a repeated series of letters again and again and again.

The telomere, basically the number of repeats that are there, dictates how many times a cell line can duplicate.

It loses repeats each time it duplicates.

And when it gets down to a critically low number, it stops reproducing.

Now, we've talked before about why that system exists.

The short version is in creatures like us, it prevents cancers from happening because if a cell line runs away and just starts reproducing, it runs into this limit, the hayflick limit, and stops reproducing.

So it prevents cancer, but it limits the amount of repair that we can do in a lifetime.

So it causes us to senesce, to age and grow feeble as we do so.

But what it said to me when I was doing that work was,

that there is a kind of information that can be stored in genomes in DNA that is not protein-oriented.

It's not what we would call allelic.

It's not written in three-letter codons.

It's actually a number stored the same way you would store a variable in a computer program, right?

The telomere, the length of the telomere,