Worms with activated survival programs due to genetic mutations are stress-resistant and live longer, exhibiting benefits similar to starvation.

“Those worms aren't just longer lived, the program to survive was activated. Those worms are stress resistant. You can hit them with heat, you can hit them with cold, you can starve them or just put them in happy conditions, they live longer. The paradigm is that normally a worm responds to its what's in the environment; if it's starved, it'll hunker down, it'll survive. But here we had a worm that was mimicking starvation and was able to have the benefits without having to starve itself.”