Briefing Chat: Dog years: could longevity science extend your pets' lives?

0:28Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, That's G-O-O dot G-L-E slash Workspace with Gemini.

0:39Hello and welcome to the Briefing Chat podcast, the Friday show where we talk about a couple of stories that have been highlighted in the Nature Briefing, Nature's daily email newsletter of the science news. I'm your host, Nick Petrichow, and joining me today is Katrina Clark. Katrina, how's it going? I'm good, Nick. How are you? Oh, I am excellent. I have got a very interesting story to talk to you about today because I have recently become a pet owner, as you well know, and this story is all about extending the lifespan of pets. I think this is great research. I don't know why it's not been at the forefront for years now.

1:16Well, to be fair, that is a fair comment because one person interviewed in this article who's like an investment analyst has said that it is kind of inevitable because there's been so much money spent on extending human life, human longevity, that it's not too surprising that that would eventually spill over into pet research as well. We love our pets. I love my pet. So we want them to stick around. We want to stick around forever. Who doesn't want to live forever? so it does seem like a match made in heaven and if you were in Toronto earlier this month you would have come across a quite unusual conference all about this sort of animal longevity and the research around it so this was a story I was reading in Nature written by a colleague Heidi Ledford.

2:01That sounds cool what sort of things do they do? So at the conference there was a range of different research that was showcased so there was research on cancer in dogs there was research on sarcopenia which is this muscle wasting condition that affects some animals and affects them in old age and you know about gene therapies and that sort of thing so it's a wide gamut of research and alongside the academic presentations there was a lot of presentations from companies as well they've been interested in repurposing human drugs for pets and you know doing gene therapies and things like that. And it was quite an unusual conference, but I think it is a sign that there is more interest in this pet longevity in addition to human longevity.

2:47Yeah, so this was the inaugural conference, so we can maybe assume this will get bigger in the future. I think that's a fair assumption. As I say, it seems that investment in longevity research in general is growing. And also people love their pets and people spend a lot of money on their pets so one estimate is that 150 billion us dollars is what the animal health market is worth so it's a lot of money and it's probably going to grow and you know if you've ever had a pet like i've experienced this you go to places and there's all sorts of food and things it's like eat this food and then your dog will live for you know longer whatever it is so it's definitely something that people are interested in companies as well but this interest from business could also benefit scientists because typically when researchers look at things like longevity in dogs and things like that to get a government grant to work on it they have to translate that in some way to humans but if there are companies specifically looking at pets then maybe researchers can tap into that interest get some funding that way to look more specifically about how to do things like extend the lifespan of your favorite dog i think it's noble research i think we should be definitely looking into how we can have our dogs live as long as we do to be honest i think that would be great you know i would love my pet to live as long as possible but i will say that one part of this conference there was more sort of fringe science so i mean you're probably familiar with cryopreservation probably more from sci-fi than from actual life this is where you like freeze down some tissue or a whole animal and then revive it at some later date that has never successfully been done for a pet or for a human or for anything no so it's quite out there in terms of science but there was one such company that was presenting at this conference and they were called cryopets inventively um and you know while this is a little bit fringe in terms of the science a lot of people are interested a lot of people do really want their pets to live as long as possible because there were 12 000 people signed up and willing to pay between 10 and 50 000 to that's mad yeah to preserve their pets and i must share with you as well a little bit about the founder of this company so the founder they launched this company because they wanted to preserve their own cat called atlas who's 15 years old and they also want to preserve a jumping spider so there is a jumping spider called cosmo who scampered across his ceiling and entered his heart one evening and it's now a member of the family and so they want to cry preserve that spider and one of the quotes from the founder is he might be one of the luckiest spiders of all time if it works yeah that's a key point if it works.

5:39Well, I wish Atlas and Cosmo the best of luck. Me too. But I think that's all I've got for my story this week. And I understand that you've got something a little bit different for us this week, Katrina. Yeah. So the Nature Careers team have just launched this new series called Am I Wrong? where researchers or scientists in general can talk about sort of dilemmas of the day. And they've just published the second in this series. So this month they had a submission from a researcher at Northwestern University who said, several years into my career, one comment from a student evaluation of my teaching stopped me cold.

6:13I didn't learn a thing. The professor was stingy with help and arrogant. I was devastated. To run this particular course, I had spent late nights answering emails, working extra hours in the office and redesigning assessments to prepare students for a competitive job market. But that comment forced me to confront a painful truth. The more I pushed students out of their comfort zone, the more some disliked me. so this researcher kind of decided to stop caring about student evaluations and just push them to be the best that they could be without caring if they liked them or not right and then a panel of other scientists were kind of reached out to by nature to give their opinions on whether this researcher was right or wrong in their assessment of this what do you think nick oh what do i think well i i don't know like i feel like it's very important from the university's perspective a lot of time these student evaluations so i don't know how their managers might feel about them not paying too much attention to it but i can see why it would be nice to not have to worry about it and just you know continue to push your students and want the best for them even if they may not like how you're doing it so i can see both sides of it which is a very unhelpful opinion but yeah I think I'll probably I'll probably come down on like doing what's best for the student even if they don't like it yeah for sure the comments from the jury are pretty wide-ranging someone saying leadership rules often come with power and with great power comes great responsibility um but also saying that's totally fair I started giving too much of myself to my students now I've got firm boundaries on how much time I'll spend on emails and preparation.

7:52Yeah, I think it's a tricky one. The way it reads to me is that the researcher has received one bad review and they've thrown their toys out of the pram. I mean, you are someone who reads like, you know, you deal with nature's social media a lot of time. You must see all sorts of comments. How would you respond to a comment like this? Well, I mean, I get criticism of my work every day, straight into my phone. So I think it's important to not take every bad comment as an indictment on your entire career and you know I think especially if you're in a kind of like a duty of care position you have to lead with sort of kindness and empathy so I think that this person should maybe accept that the student was having a hard time and not just take it as a reason to be terrible to all of the students and not care if they like them or not.

8:46It's a much more empathetic response than me, where I was like, yeah, just do what's best for the students, even if they don't like it. Force them to learn. I think that's being kind to the students as well. I think we've agreed that you have to be kind to the students. You know, they're in a really vulnerable position at that point, aren't they? No, no. And good lecturers can have a huge impact on your future career in science. I've had some great lecturers, which is why I continued in science for so long. and some of them were really patient really kind and gave a lot of themselves and i still remember that i don't remember so much the bad ones or if i do i only remember the mean things they said and don't remember anything else that they tried to teach me it's so true i mean from all schooling you remember the teachers that were special and inspired you and this teacher is perhaps not setting themselves up for that which is a shame well we all have our opinions i guess that's the point of am I wrong to find out what people's opinions are and whether you are in fact wrong so how can listeners get involved if they want to know more about this so you can take a look at the page yourself you can vote and see if you agree with everybody else but you can also submit your own bad habits that you'd maybe well arguably bad habits that you'd maybe like to be judged by the jury you can be on the jury yourself if you write into nature careers editor at nature.com and write into us as well tell us what you think about that whether you would take that approach or you take a different approach you can also tell us if you like the podcast too we're at nature podcast on social media or podcast at nature.com write in let us know what you think only good things i must say but i think that's all we've got time for on the briefing chat today if you've enjoyed the stories you've listened to we'll put links in the show notes where you can find out more about them but for now that's all so i've been nick perjage how i've been katrina o 'clock.

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