Imagine if science suddenly found a way to turn back the hands of time and make an old man young again! Oh, the excitement and thrill that would ensue! Can you even fathom the possibilities?
Gone would be the days of creaky bones, aching joints, and wrinkles that resemble a map of the Grand Canyon. No more needing a magnifying glass to read the newspaper or struggling to get out of a chair. The world would be a playground once more!
Imagine the old man’s excitement as he looks in the mirror and sees a face that is smooth and wrinkle-free. He’d be able to see his toes again without needing to bend over, and he’d be able to run like the wind without feeling like he’s about to have a heart attack. The world of dating would open up to him once again, and he could finally fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a professional breakdancer.
Scientists just made a huge step in that direction!
Scientists made mice become young again in Boston laboratories
The experiments conducted in Boston have revealed that aging can be reversed and driven in both directions. Old, blind mice regained their eyesight, became smarter and built healthier muscle and kidney tissue. On the other hand, young mice prematurely aged, resulting in damage to nearly every tissue in their bodies, according to CNN.
Youth is not gone forever, as many are tempted to believe. Instead, it could be regenerated with the right technique, as our bodies keep some sort of backup copy of the old days when we could open beer bottles with our teeth, for instance.
David Sinclair, from the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, where he serves as a professor of genetics, explained:
It’s not junk, it’s not damage that causes us to get old,
We believe it’s a loss of information — a loss in the cell’s ability to read its original DNA so it forgets how to function — in much the same way an old computer may develop corrupted software. I call it the information theory of aging.
Scientists used a mixture of “Yamanaka factors,” which are human adult skin cells that have been reprogrammed to be capable of developing into any cell in the body. They injected this mixture into damaged retinal ganglion cells of blind mice and switched it on by feeding the mice antibiotics.
The team is now trying to find a way to deliver the genetic switch evenly to each cell to rejuvenate the entire mouse at once and test the genetic reset in primates. It will be decades before any anti-aging clinical trials in humans begin and get analyzed, but the current results look promising.
The new findings were published in the journal Cell.
