Scientists successfully reverse aging in mice!
BOSTON, Massachusetts (PNN) - December 30, 2013 - Aging is that one thing that we never can fight. Sure, we can indulge ourselves with botox, wrinkle creams and hair color to appear younger, but our bodies never stop the aging process. Let’s face it: getting older is a fact of life. Or is it? What if we discovered a way to not just stop it, but to reverse it? Scientists at Harvard think it’s possible. They have developed a natural chemical that successfully turned old mice into young mice.
It seems crazy, but the Harvard team’s experiments revolve around what happens to cells as we get older. As we age, our cells lose oxygen. Without oxygen, energy levels for everything inside us - our blood and our organs - decrease and eventually stop working. As we age, NAD, a naturally occurring chemical in our body, drops to about half of what our body creates when we’re younger.
This also occurs in mice. So the scientists took that knowledge and created NAD by using young mice cells. The team injected two-year-old mice with this younger version of NAD. After a week, they took tissue samples of those mice. Those samples appeared younger, more like that of six-month-old mice. To put that into perspective in human years, that’s like taking a 60-year-old grandfather and turning him into a 20-year-old college student. That’s impressive. What’s even more impressive is that there aren’t many adverse side effects to using NAD to reverse the aging process because it already naturally occurs in the body; all we’re doing here is giving it a boost.
Of course, reversing aging isn’t the same as giving people immortality, but the potential to increase a person’s lifespan with a better quality of life at an older age is there. Combine this with other aging breakthroughs, such as stem cell research, and we may all live 100 or 200 years longer.
The only question left is do we really want to live that long?
