In Boston laboratories, in the United States, old and blind mice regained their sight and developed younger and more intelligent brains, as well as healthier muscles and kidney tissues. Young mice, on the other hand, aged prematurely, with devastating results for almost every tissue in their bodies.
The experiments show that aging is a reversible process, capable of being driven “back and forth at will,” said antiaging expert David Sinclair, professor of genetics at the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. .Glenn Center, for Research in the Biology of Aging.
Our bodies have a ‘backup’ copy of our youth that can be triggered to regenerate, said Sinclair, senior author of a new paper that showcases the work of his lab and international scientists.
The combined experiments, first published in the journal Cell, challenge the scientific belief that aging is the result of genetic mutations that damage our DNA, creating a junkyard of damaged cellular tissue that can lead to decay, disease and death.
“It’s not junk, it’s not damage that makes us age,” said Sinclair, who described the work last year at Life Itself, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN .
“We believe it’s a loss of information – a loss of the cell’s ability to read its original DNA, so that it forgets how to function – in the same way an old computer might develop corrupted software. I call this the information theory of aging.”
Jae-Hyun Yang, a Sinclair Lab genetics researcher and co-author of the paper, said he hoped the findings “will transform the way we view the aging process and the way we approach treating diseases associated with aging.”
Epigenetic changes control aging
While DNA can be seen as the hardware of the body, the epigenome is the software. Epigenes are proteins and chemicals that sit like freckles on each gene, waiting to tell the gene “what to do, where to do it, and when to do it,” according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.
Source: CNN Brasil
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