FACTS:
Scientists are reprogramming the body’s epigenetic marks, turning chemical switches on and off, to revert cells to an embryonic state. It has been effective on bone and skin cells to manufacture stem cells.
These epigenetic alterations won’t make you live forever, but you could expect another 30-50 years to be added on to your life span.
The technology still has a lot of hurdles to overcome, such as dealing with rapid tumor development, and expanding to organs and the ‘whole body’, but they believe those issues will be remedied in time.
QUOTES:
Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte of the Gene Expression Laboratory at San Diego’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies:
“I think the kid that will be living to 130 is already with us. He has already been born. I’m convinced.”
Michael West, CEO of AgeX:
“I think Izpisúa Belmonte’s paper woke a lot of people up. All of a sudden all of the leaders in aging research are like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this could work in the human body.’”
Researcher Marcelo Wood:
“We restored long-term memory function in those animals. The genes for memory—they all fire. Now that animal perfectly encodes that information straight into long-term memory.”
SOURCE:
Read the full and original article at MIT’s website here.
