Health & Fitness
What is aging? How old you are, or maybe instead how well you maintain your health? Where does aging occur? In our organs, tissues, or even individual cells? These answers to these seemingly simple questions, are anything but. In this episode, Stephen Jones tells us how his study of individual cells using a "microfluidic" machine allows him to capture about a thousand individual cells at a time and watch them over their entire lives through each (division) replication, conflict, and catastrophe, thereby directly observing the cellular aging process. Using this work has allowed him to also shed light on the processes of cellular quiescence (taking a "break" from division) and silencing (how cells keep some parts of their DNA shut off), so we can understand how these vital cellular functions contribute to the aging process!