christa was originally from framingham, massachusetts, and she was a social studies teacher who had conga high school -- school forigh several years before the teacher in space program got announced. in the opportunity to fly space and do something unique in education and to teach students all over the world, the excitement of space exploration appeal to her as it did to me, as a science teacher. the opportunity of fly in space. president reagan: today i am toecting nasa choose as the first citizen passenger in the history of our space program one of america's finest, a teacher. space programn was first announced by president reagan back in 1983, where they were going to have a citizen passenger fly aboard the space shuttle and teach somree very exciting science lessons in space. they were almost a half million teachers across the country who asked for the application. so, i'm thinking you sign your name on the former you are in the running, but it actually was a whole packet of essays that we had to write to apply for the program.n space once you got that application packet, a lot of the

part of that is the framingham study which we funded in massachusetts which taught us what the risk factorst you could interfere with. we did not know how important hypertension was and how critical it was to treat it. part of this is also drugs, statins, the most commonly prescribed drugs these days. why do we know about them? it is because of basic science research done 30 years ago by nobel laureates brown and goldstein, figuring out there was a critical pathway that controls cholesterol. and that you could interfere with that with the development of a particular drug. david: when humans emerged from caves 200,000 years ago or so, they were homo sapiens, the average life expectancy was 20. more or less. today, it is more or less in the developed worlds, maybe around 80, so we have increased our life expectancy by four times. how much longer can people keep increasing their longevity? dr. collins: so much of that happened in the last hundred years. if you look around 1900, average lifespan in the united states was late 40's, so we have dramatically extended that. is human life extendable