*When and if people start hacking the aging process, Aubrey de Grey style, it's not gonna be a fizzing blue beaker full of immortality potion. It's gonna look and sound something like this.
*But then the scientists involved in this effort wrote a pop-science article called "Ageing in human cells successfully reversed in the lab," which rather puts the cat among the pigeons. Do I believe this assertion? Well, I try not to believe extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence.
*However, if somebody grew a hunk of my own human tissue in a Petri dish and dosed it with dirt-cheap, ultra-common sulfur dioxide and those cells got all dewy and boyish again, yeah, I'd get concerned. In this case, they're not so much "rejuvenating" cells as killing off cells in a tissue that are mangled with old age, but that itself is interesting. You wouldn't be getting young again, but you'd be stripping out the oldest parts of your organism. How much of that aging infrastructure can you purge before you crumble into dust? Hey, you go first, Mr Early-Adopter!
(...)
Rejuvenating old cells
We have been looking for ways to turn the splicing factors back on. In our new work, we showed that by treating old cells with a chemical that releases small amounts of hydrogen sulphide, we were able to increase levels of some splicing factors, and to rejuvenate old human cells.
Hydrogen sulphide is a molecule that is found naturally in our bodies and has been shown to improve several features of age-related disease in animals. But it can be toxic in large amounts, so we needed to find a way to deliver it directly to the part of the cell where it is needed.
By using a “molecular postcode” we have been able to deliver the molecule directly to the mitochondria, the structures that produce energy in cells, where we think it acts, allowing us to use tiny doses, which are less likely to cause side effects.
We are hopeful that in using molecular tools such as this, we will be able to eventually remove senescent cells in living people...
