[ExI] reverse aging

[Damien Broderick]

On 11/30/2010 7:22 PM, John Grigg wrote:

> Stuart, and so was this simply a first step toward rejuvenating
> normally aged mice?

I don't see any obvious reason why this should follow. As I commented on 
a biogerontology list when a few people were getting prematurely excited 
(IMO) by this report:

On the face of it, this sounds like an incredibly silly "discovery". 
Build a car without wheels. You can't drive it anywhere. Put the wheels 
on. Look! A miracle! Now you can drive it! Ship a crew of old sea dogs 
from England to Australia without any vitamin C in their diet. They get 
scurvy and start to die. Feed them some citrus and they all recover. A 
miracle! Lemons will make you young again!

In addition, mice normally have unusually long telomeres, longer than 
ours, and die after 3 years or so. I'm not sure why added telomerase 
would help little mousies, unless they'd started life as mutant cripples.

Damien Broderick