A vaccine against the passage of time

Salt on the street and asked the people an example of the inevitable. The passage of time, they will tell you, the universal condemnation of aging and dying as all the things of this world. And all doomsayers were wrong, because aging is not an inevitable effect of the passage of time. Despite being made of the same materials, the flies are dying of old at six weeks, the mice to four years, the snails to the 15 , the dolphins at 30, the lions to the 40, the monkeys at 50, the owls to 65 and the human to the 90. Aging is negotiable in biology, and the scientists already have a good idea to stop it, or even reversed.

The researcher Spain's Juan Carlos Izpisúa and his colleagues at the Salk Institute in California and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing presented in Science a key discovery rather than to cure aging, but for something even better: we can understand it. The history of science shows that the in-depth knowledge of a phenomenon expected unchanged its technological application and social. Aging is not going to be less than gravitation, electromagnetism, the Higgs boson. It is only that has arrived later on the scientific agenda.

The Werner syndrome, is called in the texts of pathology. Progeria adult, it is also said to him, and is classified as a rare disease because only affects one in every 20,000 people. Consists of a premature aging, and its name is due to the German scientist Otto Werner, which described it in four brothers who were already old to 20 years for the doctoral dissertation to read in 1904. There are 1,300 cases described in the medical literature, which gives an idea of the fatal attraction that it exerts on the researchers this unique mutation: a genetic challenge to the passage of time.

"We demonstrate", explains Izpisúa, "that the mutation that causes the Werner syndrome leads to the disruption of the heterochromatin, and that this is one of the key causes of aging". Izpisúa has no interest in the obsessive Werner: rather see it as an ideal model for studying the root causes of the aging in general. What is not a cure for progeria, but a vaccine of aging. Not exactly a rare disease.

"We have identified a central mechanism of aging," says Izpisúa, "and it is the disruption of the heterochromatin, which we already know is reversible". Can you imagine? The clock of the biography running backwards, like a time machine for series B. The B of biology.

The Chinese and American scientists have used biological technologies of vanguard. Have been based in cultures of human embryonic stem cells, and have used the disruptive editing techniques genomics to inactivate its gene WRN. Have generated a cellular model in cultivation of aging. Cells deteriorate in the normal way, but at an accelerated speed. These crops were you can make all the it's a fact that cannot be done to a human being. The results are fast and bright.