Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/BOSTON: Researchers in Boston, during a study, were able to control aging in mice as old blind mice regained their eyesight, developed smarter, younger brains, and built healthier muscle and kidney tissue while young mice prematurely aged, with devastating results to nearly every tissue in their bodies.
The international study, which took 13 years to draw an outcome, showcases for the first time that degradation in the way DNA is organized and regulated — known as epigenetics — can cause an organism to age, independently of changes to the genetic code itself.
The experiments demonstrate that aging is a reversible process, which could be driven “forwards and backward at will,” said anti-aging expert David Sinclair, who teaches genetics at the Blavatnik Institute and is the co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School. Sinclair, who is also a senior author of a new paper showcasing the work of his lab and international scientists, said there is a backup copy of our youth in our bodies that can be triggered to regenerate.
New Study challenges current scientific viewpoint on aging
The combined experiments, published for the first time on Thursday in the journal Cell, challenge the scientific belief that aging is caused by genetic mutations that undermine our DNA and form a junkyard of damaged cellular tissue, leading to deterioration, disease and death.
“We believe it’s a loss of information, a loss in the cell’s ability to read its original DNA so it forgets how to function in a similar manner an old computer develops corrupted software. I call it the information theory of aging,” said Sinclair while describing aging.
Jae-Hyun Yang, a genetics research fellow in the Sinclair Lab who is part of the team authoring the paper, said he expects the findings will transform our approach towards aging and the treatment of diseases associated with it.
Scientists have since long debated what drives the process of senescence or deterioration in cells. They had been primarily focusing on mutations in DNA that can, over time, mess up a cell’s normal operations and trigger the process of cell death. But that theory wasn’t supported by the fact that older people’s cells often were not riddled with mutations, and that animals or people harboring a higher burden of mutated cells don’t seem to age prematurely.
