10 Things We Learned From Bret Weinstein On The Joe Rogan Experience
1. The Problem With America's Lab Mice
In a podcast jam packed full of theories and jaw-dropping realisations, Weinstein arguably saved his most shocking revelation for last.
Talking about his time as a graduate student studying bats (of all things!) in Michigan, Rogan's guest mentioned how telomeres were being studied at the time. Telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA at the end of your chromosomes and they grow shorter every time a cell divides until they reach a point when they don't divide anymore.
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Some people were studying whether this was the reason we grew feeble with age due to our cells not multiplying after the telomeres became too short over time.
However, mice have extremely long telomeres - meaning they should be able to survive longer - but they only live short lives. This didn't match the hypothesis so Weinstein looked into it and discovered something which would change everything.
Weinstein wondered whether long telomeres were simply a characteristic of lab mice and not wild mice. He was right and this proved the hypothesis may be true.
Unfortunately, this also meant that the U.S. had been testing their medical products on mice which were capable of replacing its tissues better than your typical mouse. Meaning that a toxin which will harm a human by killing tissue may not harm these mice...it may in fact help them.
Weinstein was told that this had been 'taken care of' when he tried to alert the proper authorities about this terrifying discovery.