In 2000, two scientists — Steve Austed, a biologist and Jay Olshanksy, a biostatistician — made a bet. Would a person live to the age of 150 by the year 2150? Austad bet yes and Olshansky bet no. The wager? $150, which will grow to more than one billion by the time it’s settled. In this episode, we revisit this twenty-five year old bet to find both men sticking to their guns. We also speak to Nobel Prize winner, Venki Ramakrishnan, about new insights into what causes us to age. The episode explores the latest science around aging to expose two competing ways of understanding the human lifespan. Are we locked into a hard age limit established by centuries of data? Or could a scientific breakthrough push us far beyond it so that many of us will live decades longer?

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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