THE prospects for increasing people’s lifespan look distinctly brighter after the creation of mice that live a fifth longer than usual.
“We hope that insights from this work can be used to help develop pharmacological interventions that will help extend the healthy lifespan of humans,” says team leader Peter Rabinovitch of the University of Washington in Seattle, whose team wants to develop a pill that has this effect in humans.
The research is a boost for the theory that highly reactive free radicals contribute to ageing by damaging DNA and proteins, leading to declining health and, eventually, death (see “Growing…
