By Kara Watkins-Chow
Four of USC’s leading experts on aging convened on April 23 for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books panel “Living Long or Living Well: Can We Do Both?”
Moderated by Pinchas Cohen, dean of the USC Davis School of Gerontology, the panel featured USC professors from multiple schools for an interdisciplinary conversation about healthy aging.
“USC as a university has more resources, centers and institutes focused on lifespan health and aging than any other university in the world,” said Cohen. “We really are at the epicenter of this incredible revolution in healthy aging and longevity.”
With these powerful resources, USC researchers like Lucio Comai, professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, are constantly working to understand the aging process.
“Ideally, aging would be a simple process controlled by a single molecular pathway,” said Comai. “Then we could design drugs that perfectly affect that path. But in reality, aging is a complex trait, and there is no single path that we can identify.”
Social and environmental factors combine with genetic factors to further complicate the aging process.
“My colleagues talk about the biology of it, and that is a factor, but there is something more,” said Murali Nair, clinical professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. “We are looking at holistic healthy aging.”
When taking a comprehensive look at aging, research reveals several key lifestyle behaviors that dramatically affect health.