Dr. Martin Picard

Like you have every hair on your body is about 100,000 hairs on your head.

Every hair has the same genome.

They're all genetically identical twins.

And they're all exposed to the same exercise regime, the same food, the same stress levels.

Yet some hairs go gray when you're late 30s, and then some hairs go gray when you're in your 80s.

What the hell is happening?

I thought, if we could figure this out, the basis for the heterogeneity, the hair-to-hair heterogeneity, maybe we can understand why different people age at different rates.

Because it's very clear that there's no more than 10% of how long you live that's genetically driven.

Like the best studies put this at around 7%.

7% of longevity is genetically inherited maybe, and then about 90% is not.

Is lifestyle factors.

Lifestyle, food, exposures, whatever is non-genetic.

People will take solace in those numbers.

Yeah, I think those are really powerful numbers.

And they surprised me because I had learned, you know, through my training education that the majority of how long you live is, you know, your parents.

And I think this is legacy.

It's like dogma.

It's not science-based.

It's dogma from, you know, the Human Genome Project era.

Like through the 90s, we were hoping we would find the gene for cancer, the gene for heart failure, the gene for Alzheimer's, the gene for schizophrenia.