Reversing the Aging Process

I thought this CNN article was quackery when I first saw the headline but reading the article convinced me that it's actually legitimate science.

David Sinclair, a professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research is working on reversing the aging process and has enjoyed some success with mice that will be published soon in the journal Cell.

A brief summary of the article goes like this: There are control molecules all along the strands of DNA which turn our genes on and off as well as repair them. Environmental factors like diet, pollution, chronic lack of sleep, etc. can affect the operation of these molecules so that our genes get damaged and the information contained in our genes gets corrupted, much like the information on a computer hard drive can be corrupted.

Amazingly, though, our cells apparently have the ability to reset the genes to an earlier, younger state, and research is being conducted to discover the trigger for this rest function.

Here are some highlights from the CNN piece:

“The astonishing finding is that there’s a backup copy of the software in the body that you can reset,” Sinclair said. “We’re showing why that software gets corrupted and how we can reboot the system by tapping into a reset switch that restores the cell’s ability to read the genome correctly again, as if it was young.”

It doesn’t matter if the body is 50 or 75, healthy or wracked with disease, Sinclair said. Once that process has been triggered, “the body will then remember how to regenerate and will be young again, even if you’re already old and have an illness. Now, what that software is, we don’t know yet. At this point, we just know that we can flip the switch.”

Sinclair Lab geneticist Yuancheng Lu created a mixture of three of four “Yamanaka factors,” human adult skin cells that have been reprogrammed to behave like embryonic or pluripotent stem cells, capable of developing into any cell in the body.

The cocktail was injected into damaged retinal ganglion cells at the back of the eyes of blind mice....The mice regained most of their eyesight.

Next, the team tackled brain, muscle and kidney cells, and restored those to much younger levels, according to the study.

“One of our breakthroughs was to realize that if you use this particular set of three pluripotent stem cells, the mice don’t go back to age zero, which would cause cancer or worse,” Sinclair said.

“Instead, the cells go back to between 50% and 75% of the original age, and they stop and don’t get any younger, which is lucky. How the cells know to do that, we don’t yet understand.”

Today, Sinclair’s team is trying to find a way to deliver the genetic switch evenly to each cell, thus rejuvenating the entire mouse at once.

What’s next? Billions of dollars are being poured into anti-aging, funding all sorts of methods to turn back the clock.

In his lab, Sinclair said his team has reset the cells in mice multiple times, showing that aging can be reversed more than once, and he is currently testing the genetic reset in primates.

All of that is fascinating, of course, but there's a downside as well:

But decades could pass before any anti-aging clinical trials in humans begin, get analyzed and, if safe and successful, scaled to the mass needed for federal approval.

Anyway, there's an interesting theological corollary to this work. Skeptics have long scoffed at reports in the Biblical book of Genesis of ancient people living for many centuries, but if environment plays a role in maintaining the integrity of the epigenome, if environmental changes can degrade our DNA, then long life spans in the pristine earth should not be surprising.

Then, as Genesis relates, after the occurrence of a global catastrophe the ages of the ancients went into a sudden decline which would again fit with Sinclair's theory of environmental changes corrupting DNA.

Maybe those old narratives aren't just legends and myths after all.