Could ageing be reversed? | The World Weekly

Two years ago, when The World Weekly spoke to Aubrey de Grey, the chief science officer of SENS Research Foundation famous for his belief that the first person to live to 1,000 may already have been born, he told us that within 20-25 years there is a 50% chance scientists will have developed therapies to prolong the human lifespan.

None of us have got any younger since then. But some mice have. A team of researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California has been trialling a new kind of gene therapy on mice and found that after six weeks, the test subjects appeared younger, had improved cardiovascular health, faster healing, and lived 30% longer.

The result was achieved by intermittently stimulating four genes active during the mouse’s time in the womb with the aim of rejuvenating adult cells. The breakthrough was to rewind the cell clocks without taking them all the way back to stem cells.

“Our study shows that ageing may not have to proceed in one single direction. With careful modulation, ageing might be reversed,” said Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who led the study.

Of course, as with all such revolutionary scientific advances, there are caveats. The mice studied were genetically engineered so that these genes could be easily switched on through chemicals, and they had a genetic disorder that causes accelerated ageing. Taking this research and applying it to a healthy, adult human is still a big leap. But in a decade’s time, could we be seeing therapies trialled on humans that could not only allow us to live longer, but to live better into our advanced years?

That is the hope of futurists such as Rohit Talwar, CEO of Fast Future Publishing.

“I think we are going to see a variety of breakthroughs, in roughly this order,” he told The World Weekly. “One, prolonging life expectancy by tackling some of the causes of death and ageing. Two, reducing the harmful effects of some of the conditions that set in during later life such as diabetes, arthritis, and Alzheimer's. Three, dramatic improvements in life expectancy adding years or decades, not months. Four, the reversal of the ageing process so you stay the same physical age or actually seem to get younger because science simply changes our makeup and enhances us.”

For now, such dreams are some way off, but perhaps not as far off as we might imagine if indeed the first person to live to 1,000 is walking among us today.