It was as if someone had turned back time. The once staggering legs gripped things with new strength. The mind and liver regained their youthful vitality. A vague memory became clear. According to Steve Horvath’s experiments, the biological age of rats was cut in half. “I was stunned,” he says.
Horvath, an anti-aging researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues confirmed these surprising effects in 2020 after injecting blood extracts from young rodents into older rats. And they are not alone. A growing number of labs are reporting findings that show we may have been thinking about aging the wrong way.
Aging can be caused by the forces that build our bodies in the womb and keep them alive after we are born, rather than the result of accumulated wear and tear over time. However, if you don’t turn off the switch, you will invite the decline of old age. This new perspective will enhance our understanding of what aging actually is and the potential to slow or partially reverse aging.
Although the processes that drive aging are controversial, biological gerontologists agree on one thing: the progressive decline in bodily function that most organisms experience over time. They cataloged the cellular changes that accompany this reduction. This includes disruption of chromosome ends, damaged and unstable genomes, and changes in the way cells sense nutrients.
For years, biologists have supported the idea that these features are the result of damage such as that caused by reactive molecules called free…
