Fifteen years ago, scientists made a stirring discovery when they demonstrated that they could reverse the process of aging in cells.
By activating a set of four factors in the DNA, they reset the cell’s clock to zero, reverting adult cells to their embryonic state.
The factors were named Yamanaka factors after their discoverer, Shinya Yamanaka, and a few years later, they earned him a Nobel Prize.
For the first time, scientists saw a glimmer of hope that aging could be reversed.
“It’s quite amazing if you think about it,” Wolf Reik, a molecular biologist at the Babraham Institute in the United Kingdom, tells Popular Mechanics. “You can potentially reset the age of human cells back to zero.”
Scientists hoped that these cells, stripped of the tell-tale signs of aging, could be used to repair and rejuvenate damaged organs. Younger, healthier nerve cells, for example, could take over for brain cells killed by a stroke, or collagen-boosting skin cells could be injected directly into stubborn wounds. The only problem is that the Yamanaka factors reset the cells too far. A cell that is zero days old can’t send an electrical nervous signal or produce collagen, nor carry on any other function.
