The Fountain of Youth Has Been Discovered!(Maybe)

[LesserChozo]

The Fountain of Youth?

Is this a new beginning? Or the beginning of the end? Wasn't this how Ultraviolet got started?

[Doc Scratch]

Those sorts of articles are designed to pique audience attention with possibilities that we are nowhere close to achieving.

Also, one of the comments sums it up best.
"Need more information before signing up since telomerase is linked to every cancer known to man."

[-ChozoChild-]

;w; If this is anything like the 'walking on water' topic... I doubt this is true.

[TheBlackCat]

Here is the key bit:

"The experiments used mice that had been engineered to develop severe DNA and tissue damage as a result of abnormal, premature aging. These animals had short, dysfunctional telomeres and suffered a variety of age-related afflictions that progressed in successive generations of mice. Among the conditions were testes reduced in size and depleted of sperm, atrophied spleens, damage to the intestines, and shrinkage of the brain along with an inability to grow new brain cells."

So they were repairing already-broken telomeres, rather than normal ones. There is a lot of debate on whether telomeres are involved in again at all, in fact there is a lot of debate about whether telomeres even run out. A lot of people think aging is due to problems with cellular mitochondria, for instance. So showing positive effects in mice that have normal telomeres would be interesting. But this experiment is next to useless. All it really shows is that they can link telomerase to well-known genetic switches, which is like saying water is wet by this point.