https://getpocket.com/explore/item/has-the-fountain-of-youth-been-in-our-blood-all-alongby Kat McGowan
September 28, 2021
But in this lab, headed up by neurobiologist Saul Villeda, nobody is sighing and moping over graybeard mice. Here, aging is not a sad fate to bemoan; it’s a problem to be solved. And for mice, at least, this team has already figured out how to reverse the damage time brings.
The secret is somewhere within those tiny veins. In a series of studies over the last 15 years [this article was written in 2021], Villeda and others in a few like-minded labs at places like Stanford and Harvard have shown that, when infused with blood from young mice, old ones heal faster, move quicker, think better, remember more. The experiments reverse almost every indicator of aging the teams have probed so far: It fixes signs of heart failure, improves bone healing, regrows pancreatic cells, and speeds spinal cord repair. “It sounds sensational, almost like pseudoscience,” says Villeda. It’s some of the most provocative aging research in decades.
These studies, which use a peculiar surgical method called parabiosis that turns mice into literal blood brothers, show that aging is not inevitable. It is not time’s arrow. It’s biology, and therefore something we could theoretically change. The attempt to turn back the clock in living bodies “is probably the most revolutionary experiment that biologists have done,” says Stanford professor of neurology Tony Wyss-Coray, who was Villeda’s graduate supervisor and still leads blood-based research on Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline. “It supports this notion that it is possible to reassemble and fix things that we thought are doomed to die.”
(excerpt)
