Even if there isn’t a fountain of youth, scientists are getting closer to figuring out the biology behind what drives aging—and, ultimately, how to reverse it. Yesterday, David Sinclair, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, and his team published findings that represent an important advance in understanding what causes cells to age. Yes, the work involved mice, but what the group described in the study is intruiging: a clock that can accelerate aging in the animals and then reverse it through gene therapy that makes the aged mice biologically youthful again. Here are the highlights of the work:

• The underlying idea is that epigenetic changes—that is, changes in how DNA is activated in different cells by environmental as well as other factors—can, over time, go awry and make cells age faster.
• Sinclair’s team injected mice with certain genes that seem to partially reset the epigenetic instructions in the older animals’ cells—a process somewhat similar to the way computers shed corrupt connections with a reboot.
• Whether the same process can work safely in human cells isn’t clear, but the team is now testing it in the lab.

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