Can aging be cured? Scientists are giving it a try

Can aging be cured? Scientists are giving it a try
Cutting-edge technologies are revealing the intricacies of human aging and sparking research into drugs to slow it, or even reverse it.
Seconds after his birth, Tommaso Citti has his vital signs checked at Beauregard Hospital in Aosta, Italy. Children born today in prosperous countries are very likely to live into their 90s. As the world grows significantly older, research into slowing or reversing aging becomes more and more important.
Rapamycin, widely prescribed to prevent organ rejection after a transplant, increases the life expectancy of middle-age mice by as much as 60 percent. Drugs called senolytics help geriatric mice stay sprightly long after their peers have died. The diabetes drugs metformin and acarbose, extreme calorie restriction, and, by one biotech investor’s count, about 90 other interventions keep mice skittering around lab cages well past their usual expiration date. The newest scheme is to hack the aging process itself by reprogramming old cells to a younger state.
“If you’re a mouse, you’re a lucky creature because there are a lot of ways to extend your life span,” says Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist whose breakthrough work decades ago catalyzed what is now a research frenzy. “And long-lived mice seem very happy.”
What about us? How far can scientists stretch our life span? And how far should they go? Between 1900 and 2020, human life expectancy more than doubled, to 73.4 years. But that remarkable gain has come at a cost: a staggering rise in chronic and degenerative illnesses. Aging remains the biggest risk factor for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, lung disease, and just about every other major illness. It’s hard to imagine anyone wants to live much longer if it means more years of debility and dependence.
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To understand aging,
researchers look for
clues in animals, such
as those studied
by the 51-year-old
Amboseli Baboon
Research Project (ABRP) in
Kenya. As part of that
work, Benard Oyath
and Jackson Warutere
prepare to take blood
and other samples
from Olduvai, who was
tranquilized and then
released back to the
wild. The project’s scientists have found that
baboons with strong
social connections
in adulthood can
recover from harmful
health effects of a
stressful childhood.
To understand aging,
researchers look for
clues in animals, such
as those studied
by the 51-year-old
Amboseli Baboon
Research Project (ABRP) in
Kenya. As part of that
work, Benard Oyath
and Jackson Warutere
prepare to take blood
and other samples
from Olduvai, who was
tranquilized and then
released back to the
wild. The project’s scientists have found that
baboons with strong
social connections
in adulthood can
recover from harmful
health effects of a
stressful childhood.
Photograph by NICHOLE SOBECKI
But if those mouse experiments lead to drugs that clean up the molecular and biochemical wreckage at the root of so many health problems in old age, or to therapies that slow—or, better yet, prevent—that messy buildup, then many more of us would reach our mid-80s or 90s without the aches and ailments that can make those years a mixed blessing. And more might reach what is believed to be the natural maximum human life span, 120 to 125 years. Few people get anywhere close. In industrialized nations, about one in 6,000 reaches the century mark and one in five million makes it past 110. The record holder, Jeanne Calment in France, died in 1997 at 122 years, 164 days.
Human biology, it seems, can be optimized for greater longevity. Unimaginable riches await whoever cracks the code. No wonder investors are pouring billions into trying. Google led the spending spree with the 2013 launch of Calico Life Sciences, where Kenyon is the vice president of aging research. Over the past few years, investment in the industry has come from tech tycoons, overnight crypto millionaires, and most recently Saudi royals. It seems everyone with cash to burn is placing a bet on aging’s next—or really, its first—big thing.
This work is powered by artificial intelligence, big data, cellular reprogramming, and an increasingly exquisite understanding of the zillions of molecules that keep our bodies humming. Some researchers even talk about “curing” aging.
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Left: Matt Kaeberlein, 51, a pathology professor at the University of Washington, deadlifts 305 pounds in his North Bend, Washington, garage. He believes exercise is the most important way to prevent disease and disability in old age, but like other scientists, he hopes to find medications to help. Kaeberlein is investigating whether rapamycin, a drug used to prevent organ rejection, can increase the life span of dogs and decrease their incidence of age-related disease. One reason he chose to study pets is because they live with people, sharing the same environment.
Right: Veterinary cardiologist
Ryan Baumwart
performs an echocardiogram on a dog
named Joe Pup at
Washington State
University in Pullman
as part of Kaeberlein’s
study of whether
rapamycin has
antiaging potential.
Photographs by David Guttenfelder
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Left: Rochelle Buffenstein,
a research professor
at the University
of Illinois, Chicago,
examines a naked
mole rat. She has spent
decades studying the
long-lived mammal,
looking for ways to
adapt its unique traits
to prevent some of
the adverse effects
of aging in humans.
​
Photograph by David Guttenfelder
Right: A yellow-winged bat
rests in a biologist’s
hand in Uganda.
Eighteen of the
19 mammals that live
proportionally longer
than humans based on
body size are bats.
(The naked mole rat is
the other.) Bats fascinate scientists because
they carry deadly
viruses but are not
affected by them.
Photograph by NICHOLE SOBECKI
Humans have chased dreams of eternal youth for centuries. But the study of aging and longevity was such a scientific backwater as recently as 30 years ago that Cynthia Kenyon had trouble recruiting young researchers to assist her in the experiments that would break the field open. Working then at the University of California, San Francisco, she altered one gene in tiny roundworms known as C. elegans and doubled their life span. The mutants acted younger, too, slithering friskily under the microscope while their unaltered peers lay about like lumps.
Kenyon’s startling discovery showed that aging was malleable—controlled by genes, cellular pathways, and biochemical signals. “The whole thing shifted from being out there in the nebulous world to familiar science that everyone understood,” she says. “And everyone could do it. So people just moved in.”
Delaying death in worms and mice, however, doesn’t mean it will work in humans. For a hot minute, senolytics, which kill damaging cells that accumulate with age, appeared poised to become the first antiaging therapy to make it through the regulatory gauntlet. But one of the first clinical trials, a highly anticipated study of an osteoarthritis treatment, found that it didn’t reduce swelling or joint pain any better than a placebo. Researchers and biotech companies are now testing senolytics to treat early onset Alzheimer’s, long COVID, chronic kidney disease, frailty in cancer survivors, and a complication of diabetes that can cause blindness. Clinical trials of other antiaging compounds are also under way. But so far, none of the experimental drugs that have had such dazzling effects in mice have made it to the market.
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Arnold Camfferman free-falls about 7,000 feet above Ameland, an island off the coast of the Netherlands. As a skydiving instructor who’s still teaching, the 69-year-old has jumped out of airplanes more than 20,800 times. “I don’t want to stop anytime soon,” he says. His advice for a long and healthy life? “Never ever stop playing.”
VIDEO BY JASPER DOEST (WITH AARON MOLLOY)
“There are lots of different approaches,” Kenyon says. “We don’t know if any of them will work. But maybe they’ll all work! Maybe combinations will be fabulous. The good news now is that people have literally accepted this kind of science as being real. They’re excited about the possibilities. We just have to try a lot of things. And that’s what people are doing.”
Walt Crompton, a retired biomedical engineer in Silicon Valley, is 69 years old. He has ample white hair, a white goatee, and a dark vision of growing older. “I’m at the age where I’m swirling around faster and faster at the bottom of the toilet,” he says. “You look around, more and more of your peers are dying, getting horrible diseases. You have little aches and pains, all of a sudden your knee hurts when you run, and blah, blah, blah. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
With a mindset like that, it’s no surprise Crompton became obsessed with aging and life-extension research. He read the mouse studies. He helped out at a longevity lab. He attended conferences where scientists spoke of the “hallmarks” of aging, the interconnected ways that biology goes awry over time.
Mirsada Mehinagić, 65,
swings her two-year-old granddaughter,
Selma, while her
husband, Mirsad, 66,
watches bemused on
the terrace of their
home in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“With the children
around, I have to
sing and jump a lot,”
she says. “It keeps
us young.” Humans
evolved to be active,
so a sedentary senior
lifestyle is risky, but
even modest exercise
can improve physical
and mental health.
Photograph by JASPER DOEST
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Protective caps on chromosomes, called telomeres, shorten. The genome becomes unstable and cancer-causing DNA mutations increase. Changes occur in the epigenome—compounds that latch onto DNA and regulate the activity of genes. Some cells become senescent, meaning they stop functioning normally, but like zombies, they don’t die, and they secrete chemicals that cause inflammation. Disruptions occur in pathways that respond to nutrients, lipids, and cholesterol, throwing metabolism out of whack. And the list goes on. There’s no consensus on how these changes influence one another, or which is the most important to address.
At a conference, Crompton heard a scientist named Gregory Fahy explain his theory that immunological aging could be reversed by treating the thymus, a small gland in the chest that stimulates the development of disease-fighting T cells. Fahy was seeking volunteers to test his idea that injections of recombinant human growth hormone, a drug used for decades to treat children with short stature, could rejuvenate the thymus and the body’s waning defenses against disease. Fahy had injected himself with the stuff on and off for eight years, and with his thick dark brown hair and youthful enthusiasm, he appeared in enviable shape for a guy of Social Security age. Crompton signed up.
Fahy, the chief scientific officer of Intervene Immune, a California-based company, is well known as a cryobiologist who developed a technique to preserve kidneys by infusing them with ethylene glycol and storing them at minus 135°C (-211°F) until they can be transplanted. He created a stir by rewarming a rabbit brain in near-perfect condition, raising hopes a way will be found to allow mammalian brains, ours included, to survive cryopreservation. But Fahy has been fascinated by the thymus for decades, since he read a study by scientists who refreshed the immune systems of rats by implanting cells that make growth hormone. He believes most drugs that extend mice lives will disappoint us, because they “don’t do anything about keeping your immune system from going south.”
“Don’t eat too much,”
says Grazia Cosmano,
102, and stick to
fruits and vegetables.
“Keep it as simple as
possible.” That’s how
Cosmano became
one of an unusual
concentration of
centenarians in Italy’s
Calabria region, says
biochemist Valter
Longo of the University
of Southern California.
Longo, whose parents
are from Cosmano’s
hometown of
Molochio, has known
her since childhood.
When she turned
100, he added
her to his study of
Calabria’s centenarians
and their diet.
Photograph by JASPER DOEST
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Left: Fasting may
help explain why
Calabria has so many
centenarians. Longo
says in lean times they
ate little, perhaps just
pasta with
olive oil and legumes.
To test if a diet
mimicking a fast
can reset the body’s
metabolism, Longo is
enlisting 500 people
from the region with
health problems, such
as obesity. For five
days every three
months, some of them
will eat only enough to
stave off hunger:
a combination of
nut-based or chocolate-crisp bars, spearmint
or hibiscus tea, an algal
oil capsule, vegetable
soup, a multivitamin and
mineral supplement,
almond-and-kale
crackers, olives, and a
glycerol drink. “We are
hoping to demonstrate
that this changes the
health of most people,”
Longo says.
Right: Cosmano has pasta for lunch in her home. Since she was young, she has eaten vegetables
almost exclusively from her own garden. And she eats no red meat. She had two sisters
and three brothers, and she’s outlived them all, becoming the first centenarian in her
family. She’s known Longo since he was a child, and now he’s studying her diet. “I have
been following her in my scientist capacity,” he says. Longo says Calabria once had a very
healthy diet, but now it’s one of the worst in the world.
​
Photographs by JASPER DOEST
Recombinant human growth hormone is off patent, so repurposing it for antiaging won’t yield the financial bonanza of a new drug; it’s also associated with an elevated risk of some cancers. Fahy tried to get other scientists interested in doing a clinical trial and failed. “I took matters into my own hands and started regenerating my own thymus based on what I could glean from the rat study,” he says.
Because the drug can raise the risk of type 2 diabetes, he added two pills: metformin and dehydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA, a hormone that improves blood-sugar regulation. Both are also thought to mitigate the effects of aging, and they’re commonly used for that purpose. Metformin, which is taken for diabetes by 150 million people worldwide, may reduce the incidence of neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. U.S. researchers are planning a study to see if it prevents or delays major age-related illnesses. But some longevity scientists aren’t waiting: They pop metformin daily.
Crompton says he immediately felt the effects of Fahy’s regimen. “It seemed like I could leap tall buildings in a single bound.” He shed unwanted pounds without dieting. Another participant, Hank Pellissier, 70, tells me his hair, previously white, began growing in brown.
Tests showed that T cell production increased with the treatment, thymus fat disappeared, and kidney and prostate health improved. Most striking, the men lost an average of two and a half years of biological age, as measured by what’s known as an epigenetic clock. It uses blood to measure chemical changes to DNA that alter gene expression and mark the passage of time.
Fahy’s study, published in 2019 in the journal Aging Cell, was too small to prove anything, and it was not placebo controlled. Nevertheless, the experiment provided the tantalizing suggestion that a medical intervention might lower a person’s biological age. Steve Horvath, who developed the epigenetic clock that’s now a go-to tool in longevity research, was impressed. The 55-year-old geneticist and biostatistician is now a participant in the larger trial Fahy is conducting.
Fahy, who is 72, enrolled as his own guinea pig and resumed his hormone injections. “I’m getting up there, unfortunately,” he says. “The clock is ticking. I have to do my work fast to save not only everybody else but myself as well.”
At 98, my mother, Dorothy, has outlived my father, her two younger sisters, and a late-life boyfriend. Her short gray bob is always salon perfect. She is thin and walks slowly, with a cane, but she stands straight. On most weekdays she goes to her neighborhood senior center, where she takes exercise classes, dances, and eats lunch with friends. She never forgets a birthday or a bill due.
Joan Valentine, 90,
tests her gait at Harbor
Hospital as part of the
Baltimore Longitudinal
Study of Aging. Since
her first visit in 2012,
she has returned eight
times. Launched in
1958, it’s one of the
longest such studies
in the world. The
researchers have
followed more than
3,200 people, some
of them for more
than 50 years.
They collected blood
and urine samples,
measured strength
and agility, assessed
cognitive function,
and performed
physical exams.
The data have been
used in thousands of
scientific papers.
Photograph by David Guttenfelder
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Not much about her lifestyle would have predicted such healthy longevity. She escaped Nazi Germany as an adolescent, suffering more than her share of trauma, though I’ve never heard her use that word. She smoked cigarettes for decades. My father was a butcher, and we lived on red meat. On the plus side, she has always been physically active. She ran competitive track as a child, walked a few miles back and forth to work, and swam several times a week for years after she retired.
Scientists study healthy elders like my mother and track centenarians to figure out how they manage to defy the actuarial tables. Kristen Fortney, a 40-year-old biotech executive with a Ph.D. in medical biophysics, is putting big data and computational wizardry to the task. Most drug development for aging aims to fix something that goes wrong; Fortney is trying to understand what goes right.
“I’ve always approached it from the perspective of what’s going to have the greatest impact and what’s the low-hanging fruit,” Fortney says. “I’ve always believed that’s to copy what already works. There are already all these human examples of successful aging … individuals out there who are making it to a hundred and beyond, and their muscles still work, their brains still work, so we know it can be done.”
Fortney’s company, BioAge Labs in Richmond, California, analyzes blood and tissue stored in biobanks from Hawaii to Estonia. The specimens are linked to electronic medical records, so Fortney and her colleagues know the health outcomes of the people behind every vial of blood, and they search for biomarkers that distinguish those who’ve aged well. Machines measure each sample for up to tens of thousands of variables, including 7,000 proteins. (A decade ago, the best technology could pick out only a few hundred.) Using artificial intelligence, the scientists then identify possible targets for medication and search the reject piles of pharmaceutical companies for drugs that were developed for other purposes and shown to be safe but never released.
Fortney’s team has tested several dozen drug candidates in mice, and has two in clinical trials. One targets the immune system, and the other addresses muscle mass and strength. Because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves drugs only if they prevent or treat a disease, and the agency doesn’t consider aging a disease, trials such as Fortney’s investigate a drug’s effect on an age-related condition. But the researchers almost always have grander ambitions.
For example, Fortney is evaluating a compound, code-named BGE-117, for age-related muscle dysfunction because it acts on a pathway involved in tissue regeneration, remodeling blood vessels, and other critical processes. But the hope, the company explains, is to target “multiple diseases of aging with large unmet needs, high prevalence, and huge markets.”
It was feeding time when I visited Vera Gorbunova’s super-agers: 300 naked mole rats, give or take—a litter had been born four days earlier, and one pregnant female looked ready to burst. The refrigerator held bountiful options, including five pounds of apples, 18 ears of corn, two pounds of celery, three bags of romaine lettuce, purple grapes, bananas, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and carrots, all of it organic.
Naked mole rats can live more than 40 years in captivity, 10 times longer than typical for a rodent their size. I couldn’t help thinking we’d all live longer if we just ate what these small, wrinkled, bucktoothed creatures do. Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov, who are married and both biologists at the University of Rochester, study naked mole rats in hopes of stealing their longevity adaptations for us. “In every long-lived animal we find something new. Crazy things!” Gorbunova tells me.
To slow Don Lueck’s
dementia, his doctors
suggested he learn
a new skill. He took
up art in 2019 and
has made more than
17,000 paintings.
The hobby helped the
gregarious 77-year-old
endure pandemic imposed isolation in
his Madison, Wisconsin,
home. “Painting every
day during this time
saved our lives,
because his brain was
actively engaged in
a creative process he
loves,” says his wife,
Jenny Villwock.
“He often includes
faces or creatures
in his painting—someone with whom
he could socialize.”
Photograph by David Guttenfelder
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A gallery of Don Lueck’s paintings
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The mystery of the phenomenal longevity of some animals has propelled studies around the globe. Researchers have endured Arctic storms and seasickness to catch, study, tag, and release Greenland sharks, which live at least 250 years and maybe even a few centuries more. Scientists dredging ocean quahog clams from the seabed north of Iceland hauled up a 507-year-old. University of Birmingham biologist João Pedro de Magalhães, seeking clues in DNA, sequenced the genome of the bowhead whale, a 120,000-pound behemoth thought to be the longevity champion of the mammalian world but endangered by pollution and other threats. He also worked with Gorbunova and Seluanov to investigate the naked mole rat genome.
The rodent habitat in Rochester, New York, is 90 degrees, dark, and humid, like a burrow. Each colony—a queen, her consorts, and many generations of her minions—inhabits its own plexiglass dwelling. It has wide tubes connecting three large canisters, ostensibly for sleeping, eating, and excreting. If naked mole rats don’t like a meal, says Nancy Corson, who manages the colonies, “they’ll put it in the toilet.”
They look adorably social as they somersault over one another and huddle in piles like laundry, but they’re belligerently territorial. Researcher Rochelle Buffenstein, who once had more than 7,500 and now has 2,000 in her lab at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has found the old don’t die any more often than the young. “Many of them die because they fight,” Gorbunova says. “That is not age dependent.”
Gorbunova showed me the other residents in her lab: Damaraland mole rats; Chilean rodents called degus, a model for studying Alzheimer’s; and African spiny mice, which have almost mythical powers to regenerate skin and cartilage. A large freezer is packed with tissue from squirrels, rabbits, porcupines, beavers, wild mice, bats, and two dozen other species. She gets these specimens from exterminators, hunters, animal-control officers, state conservation employees. She also traps some. And Wolfy, the family German shepherd whose framed portrait is displayed in her office, deposits the occasional carcass on her doorstep. I winced at that. “They served science,” she assures me.
Bowhead whales have more than a thousand times the cells we do, which should dramatically increase their risk of a cancer-causing mutation. But they don’t get cancer. Studies have shown they are astonishingly efficient and accurate at repairing DNA and keeping cells healthy. Gorbunova has found that other long-lived animals, including naked mole rats, share this superpower.
In her lab in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Miranda Orr, an assistant professor of gerontology and geriatric
medicine, looks at images of mouse brains. Orr’s discovery of senescent cells in human brains could have profound
implications for treating Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. She’s found senescent cells
that are neurons—many, but not all, with tau tangles. Now she’s trying to determine whether senescence causes
tangles or tangles cause senescence.
Photograph by David Guttenfelder
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Bats control inflammation so masterfully they can harbor viruses without getting sick, a feat that drew global attention after they were suspected as the source of the pandemic’s coronavirus. “We were interested in bats even before COVID,” Gorbunova says. Scientists estimate that chronic inflammation, which often progresses as we age, is a major factor in more than half of all deaths worldwide.
And naked mole rats? One of their antiaging marvels is hyaluronan, a gooey sugar secreted by connective tissue. We make the substance, too, and it’s a staple of “age defying” skin creams. But Gorbunova and Seluanov discovered that the naked-mole-rat version has a different, heavier, molecular structure from ours, it’s much more abundant, and it doesn’t degrade as much as ours does. (And she told me, to my disappointment, that it’s produced differently from the pricey products I slather on my face.) Hyaluronan in naked mole rats not only makes their skin supple enough to squeeze through cramped tunnels but also suppresses tumors, the biologists found.
Studying longevity inevitably makes scientists contemplate their own. Once they pass a certain age, many do something—or a lot of things—to stave off molecular damage. Gorbunova, who is 51, tells me she eats seaweed because it activates a protein, sirtuin 6, which aids DNA repair and genomic stability. It struck me as on-brand that a biologist whose ringtone is a barking dog, and who says she chose her specialty because “I like animals and everything you can learn from them,” would try to enhance her own longevity by consuming fish food.
Gorbunova doesn’t study humans, though we’re considered long-lived animals too. We outlive all other primates, and not only because they’re more likely to be eaten by lions. Within a generation, Gorbunova believes, we’ll have treatments that extend the human life span by a decade or two. To push beyond that would require fundamentally changing the human operating system, and that may not be as wild as it sounds. “I think it’s possible,” she says.
In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka, a stem cell researcher in Japan, figured out how to reprogram adult cells and return them to an embryonic-like state. The discovery revolutionized cell biology and the search for ways to treat human diseases, winning Yamanaka a Nobel Prize. Now researchers are determined to use the technique, called cellular reprogramming or epigenetic reprogramming, to reverse aging and eradicate the illnesses that come with it.
“The implications could be bigger than CRISPR,” says biologist David Sinclair, referring to the transformative gene-editing technology. “I’m going to get destroyed for saying that! It’s certainly the biggest thing since CRISPR in terms of the amount of money and people getting into it.”
A group of high-profile tech entrepreneurs, including Jeff Bezos, shook the tight-knit world of aging research in early 2022 with the launch of a three-billion-dollar reprogramming venture, Altos Labs. Yamanaka signed on as an adviser, and other superstar scientists were lured from prestigious academic posts. Depending on your point of view, the massive investment in a technology that is itself embryonic either epitomizes Silicon Valley hubris or marks a shrewd bet on the future of medicine. “People will not invest serious money unless the science is believable,” says Steve Horvath, who retired recently from the University of California, Los Angeles to join Altos. “So the question is, will you and I benefit?”
Yamanaka used four proteins known as transcription factors, which initiate and regulate gene expression, to erase the identity of mature cells—essentially rewinding them to their original state. The leap to apply it to aging came from Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a biologist studying organ regeneration. He wanted to use the Yamanaka factors to turn back time only partway, restoring the youthful resilience of cells while maintaining their identity and function.
He and his team at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, experimented with mice for several frustrating years until they hit upon a protocol that rejuvenated the animals instead of killing them. They used partial reprogramming to extend the lives of prematurely aged mice and to accelerate healing in normally aged old mice with muscle injuries. At the time, Izpisua Belmonte said the experiments demonstrated that aging “may not have to proceed in one single direction.”
Now, as a scientific director at Altos, he no longer talks publicly about turning aging into a two-way street. The company insists it is not in the business of reversing aging but of reversing disease. Maybe the backers want to distance themselves from the long, dubious history of antiaging snake oil, or they have their sights on what the FDA will approve: treatments for diseases, not for aging. But I was not the only one to puzzle over their distinction.
“What’s the difference?” Sinclair says, rolling his eyes.
Sinclair, a professor of genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School, makes no secret of his mission to thwart aging, including his own. He has founded and invested in more than a dozen companies to commercialize longevity technologies and molecules. At 53, he takes metformin and sprinkles resveratrol on his breakfast. “I try things once, at least, that people are talking about,” he says. “I’m curious. I like to be an experimenter.” He lifts weights to keep his hormone levels up—he posted on Instagram that his testosterone is high. He recently adopted a vegan diet. “It’s not as boring as I thought it would be,” he tells me. He closely monitors his biological age through InsideTracker, a company he advises that analyzes 43 biomarkers.
In a program developed by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, older adults view paintings and prints in the
collection. Engaging with the arts, such as visiting a museum, watching a play, or listening to a symphony, can lead
to a longer, healthier life. Daisy Fancourt, an associate professor of behavioral science and health at University
College London, found that adults 50 and older who experienced art once or twice a year had a 14 percent lower
risk of dying and those doing so every few months dropped the risk by 31 percent.
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When I visited his office, he offered to show me his results. We looked at the graphs on a computer screen. First up: C-reactive protein, an indicator of inflammation. “I’m way below what a 20-year-old would have,” he says. He scrolled through more data, concluding, “I’m way off the chart for youth.”
Sinclair modified the Yamanaka formula, eliminating one transcription factor that has been implicated in cancer, and then used partial reprogramming in mice to regrow crushed optic nerves. “That was great,” he says, “but I thought if this is really age reversal, we should be able to reverse age-related disease.” So he tried it in mice with a glaucoma-like condition, and their vision returned. But they weren’t very old, so Sinclair decided to reprogram cells of geriatric mice experiencing age-related vision loss. A colleague who is an ophthalmology researcher bet him it wouldn’t work.
“And guess what?” Sinclair says. “It did.”
Since publishing the results in Nature in December 2020, Sinclair has continued the studies and says the benefits appear long-lasting. Meanwhile, he and the researchers in his lab are doing mind-bending back-to-the-future experiments in which they speed up aging in mice, turning them wizened and sluggish, or accelerate aging in just one organ or in all of them. By switching aging on, they hope to learn how to shut it off.
Sinclair targeted the optic nerve because it’s one of the first places affected by aging. Shortly after birth, we lose the ability to regenerate cells there. He believes his studies offer a game-changing model for treating spinal cord injuries and disorders of the central nervous system. If turning back cellular age can recapture lost vision, he says, why not also the ability to walk or remember?
Five habits may increase life expectancy by 14 years in women and 12 years in men: good diet, regular exercise, healthy weight, not smoking, and not drinking too much.
Nobody knows when, or whether, a moon-shot technology like cellular reprogramming will do for humans what it accomplishes so marvelously in mice. But in the meantime, we can do plenty to take on aging. Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health looked at decades of data from 123,219 adults in the U.S. and found that five habits may increase life expectancy by 14 years in women and 12 years in men: good diet, regular exercise, healthy weight, not smoking, and not drinking too much.
“I think the one that gives you the most bang for your buck, if you’re only going to do one—which I don’t recommend—is exercise,” said Matt Kaeberlein, a professor of laboratory medicine and pathology and the director of the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington.
He’s a hard-core scientist, not a fitness guru. His lab developed a robotics platform called WormBot, which collects data simultaneously from hundreds of parallel experiments to tease out the factors that influence the life span of the roundworm C. elegans. He’s also testing rapamycin in dogs. But no matter how busy he gets, three days a week Kaeberlein, 51, heads to the makeshift gym in his garage and cycles through bench presses, squats, dead lifts, and shoulder lifts to maintain muscle mass. “For most people over 50, loss of muscle mass due to a sedentary lifestyle usually is one of the most important predictors of poor health outcomes later on,” he says.
Several times a week, Ries Nieuwkoop takes an ice bath in an antique tub in his backyard in Zwolle, Netherlands. The health benefits of cold therapy have not been extensively studied in humans, but advocates say it
soothes aches, sharpens their thinking, and even helps with weight loss. Nieuwkoop, 79, offers his own
rationale: “The cold water trains the flexibility of your nervous system, something that will help you to stay
calm in the ice bath. It is good for blood circulation, too, and I believe that this is healthy. The ice bath makes
me feel very relaxed.”
Photograph by JASPER DOEST
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
Fitness experts argue endlessly about which exercise regimen best maximizes health and strength late in life. Similarly, nutrition experts disagree about the optimal diet—time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting, keto, vegan, Mediterranean, you name it.
Animal studies provide compelling evidence that severe calorie restriction increases life span. Whether that’s true for people has been notoriously difficult to determine. The National Institute on Aging initiated a large study two decades ago to measure the effects of a diet that cut calories by 25 percent. But even though participants received counseling, software to track what they ate, and meals for a while, they shaved calories by only 12 percent. I was reminded of the doctor who told me the best healthy diet is the one you’ll follow.
Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at Yale University, points to another important, controllable influence on healthy longevity: our beliefs about aging. In one study, which has been replicated around the world, Levy found that people in their 30s and 40s who had positive expectations for old age—they equated it with wisdom, for example, instead of decrepitude—were more likely to be in good health decades later. In another study, she showed that older people who have positive views of aging are much more likely to recover fully from a disabling injury. And in yet another, she found that positive views of old age were associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s. Levy has found that people with the brightest beliefs about aging live an average of seven and a half years longer than those with the gloomiest.
Teun Toebes (center)
chats with residents
of a nursing home
for adults with
dementia in Utrecht
in the Netherlands.
The 23-year-old stayed
there for more than
two years, living for
free in exchange
for interacting with
the residents. “I believe
that everyone has the
right to a beautiful,
equal, and inclusive
society,” he says.
Photograph by JASPER DOEST
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
Reading research by scientists trying to unravel the mysteries of aging can make it hard to feel good about growing older. The idea of “curing” aging casts it as pathology. Published studies start, relentlessly, with bad news. “Aging is a degenerative process that leads to tissue dysfunction and death,” begins a typical paper. As I learned more about the science, I grew excited about the possibilities for breakthroughs but distressed about my own prospects as I approached 68.
Steve Horvath offered to run an epigenetic clock on me, a test with the anxiety-producing name of GrimAge. I sent him two vials of my blood. A while later I opened the report: My biological age was 3.3 years lower than my chronological age. The report offered a cheerful “congrats” and said, “You are already beating the clock!” But I felt let down. I certainly wasn’t in league with David Sinclair in bucking the tempest of time.
Then I thought about my mother, still enjoying life in her late 90s. Becca Levy’s research convinced me that my mom’s outlook at least partly explains her vitality. I’ve never heard her grumble about her birthday or say she can’t do something because she’s too old, a complaint I’m starting to hear from friends my age.
“No,” she says, when I point this out. “I’m not too old. I might do it slower, and I might do less of it. But I’m not too old to dance or walk or do anything I like to do.”
She pauses. “Well, I wouldn’t swim anymore.”
“Because you haven’t done it in a long time?”
“Because I don’t like the way I look in a bathing suit.”
Fran Smith, a regular contributor to the magazine, lives near New York City and specializes in stories about health. Four National Geographic Society Explorers photographed this story: Jasper Doest from Rotterdam, Netherlands; David Guttenfelder from Minneapolis; Nichole Sobecki from Nairobi, Kenya; and Melanie Wenger from Paris. Learn more about the Society’s support of its Explorers.
Watch Limitless With Chris Hemsworth, a series on human potential and combating aging by National Geographic, streaming now on Disney+.
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