Steven Austad

At a glance

• Biogerontologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he chaired the Department of Biology from 2014 to 2022; also affiliated with the American Federation for Aging Research.
• Specialist in the comparative biology of ageing: why do some animals — from parrots and bats to naked mole-rats and clams — live so much longer than others?
• Became known for field research on opossums living on a predator-free island, which aged more slowly than their mainland relatives.
• Wrote the popular books Why We Age (1997) and Methuselah’s Zoo (2022).
• In 2000 he made a public bet with demographer S. Jay Olshansky on whether someone alive at the time will reach the age of 150.
• He stresses that women outlive men in almost every society, yet more often live with disability, and studies the biological reasons for these differences.
• Takeaway: nature shows that ageing has no fixed pace, but lessons from long-lived animals have not (yet) turned into a pill for humans.