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I've posted before about reversing aging. This is a major theme of science fiction. Some cosmetic manufacturers claim to have products that have some effect, but if they worked those products would have to go through medical approval. None have.

Many of the symptoms of aging are caused by shortening telomeres. That's the ends of chromosomes. Each time a cell divides, 6 base pairs are snipped off. When all of the telomere is gone, the enzyme that unzips a chromosome for duplication cannot latch on, so cell division stops. When this happens, a cell is called senescent. That's Latin for asleep. The cell's metabolism becomes slow, it grows large. It literally becomes fat and lazy. When this happens to too many cells, you age. Furthermore, wear can cause bits of chromosomes to break off. A telomere protects genes from damage, but once telomeres are gone, genes at the ends of chromosomes are subject to damage. Senescent cells malfunction.

Telomeres are a count-down timer. It starts at full length at conception, counts down to zero. When your cells reach zero, they can't divide, cannot produce new cells to repair tissue. There is a disease that shortens telomeres prematurely: progeria. Symptoms show us which features of aging are caused by this. Symptoms:

• Slow height and weight growth

• A bigger head

• Large eyes, which they can’t close all the way

• A small lower jaw

• A thin nose with a "beaked" tip

• Ears that stick out

• Veins you can see

• Slow and abnormal tooth growth

• A high-pitched voice

• Loss of body fat and muscle

• Hair loss, including eyelashes and eyebrows

• Thin, wrinkled skin that shows spots

The body has a means to repair telomeres. If it didn't, babies would be born with the same cellular age as the parent. Meiosis is the special type of cell division that produces a gamete cell: sperm for a man, ovum for a woman. Each gamete cell has 23 chromosomes instead of 23 pairs, a sperm must merge with an ovum for a cell to have enough chromosomes for a baby. Meiosis does a number of things, one is production of an enzyme called telomerase. This enzyme repairs telomeres to full length. So sperm and ovum have full-length telomeres.

So how do we treat this? About 2 decades ago I suggested gene therapy. Humans have the gene to produce telomerase, all we need is to activate it. The only time telomeres are shorted is during cell division, so the gene to repair telomeres only needs to be activated then. It's currently activated during meiosis, let's add an activation sequence for mitosis (normal cell division). I suggested testing this with a laboratory mouse. Shortly after I talked to everyone I could find about this, someone created the "Methuselah Mouse Prize". The purpose is to create a laboratory mouse with significantly extended life span. I guess somebody did listen.

There has been research to give us more information. In 1996 a group in Scotland cloned a sheep. The idea was to produce an expensive pharmaceutical. The drug cost thousands of dollars per gram. Their objective was to add the human gene to produce this into a sheep. To ensure the drug did not affect the sheep's growth, they ensured it would only be expressed (activated) when the genes for milk were expressed. So the drug would be produced in milk, not in the sheep's blood. The sheep would only produce a single digit number of grams per litre of milk. The drug costs thousands of dollars per gram to synthesize, but just go to any grocery store to see how much it costs to produce a litre of milk. This would make production of that drug a lot less expensive. To clone, they took a sheep body cell, remove the nucleus, did their gene modification to that nucleus. Then punched out the nucleus of a sheep ovum, put this modified nucleus in the ovum, then gave it a mild electric shock to start dividing. It worked, however the sheep had an unexpected problem: arthritis. Basically, the sheep aged prematurely. They hadn't applied sheep telomerase to lengthen telomeres before putting the cell nucleus into the ovum. So the sheep was born with its aging clock at the same point as the sheep that donated the body cell. Basically, it was conceived at the age of its parent. Oops! Ok, so the they missed a step in cloning. Ok, that's what experimentation is for. So this tells us that cloning requires applying telomerase before starting the cell to divide. Either before or after putting the cell nucleus in the ovum, but before starting cell division. This reminds us of the importance of telomeres.

We now have an opportunity. COVID vaccines uses a lipid capsule to deliver mRNA. This lipid capsule was developed specifically for gene therapy. Remember how mRNA works. When your body needs a protein, the template for that protein is a single gene on one of your chromosomes. That short section of DNA is opened, a copy is transcribed into RNA, then that section of your chromosome is closed. This strand of RNA is called messenger RNA or mRNA. That strand is taken out of the nucleus to a structure called a ribosome. The ribosome reads the RNA, every group of 3 base pairs encodes for one amino acid. Small sections of RNA called transfer RNA or tRNA carry one amino acid, and have a matching triplet of base pairs. The ribosome matches these up, links amino acids into a chain to create protein. This is how the human body makes all proteins, including telomerase. So rather than gene therapy, what we could do is inject a sequence of mRNA into human cells to produce telomerase. This would not be a permanent change, because mRNA cannot modify your genes. It's only used as a template to create protein. Can we use this to repair telomeres, reset the aging clock back to conception?

The human body has several systems. Bone growth requires growth plates. Those growth plates disappear when we reach adulthood. Any further bone growth is not possible once those growth plates are gone. So don't expect this treatment would cause you to shrink into a baby. The best it could do is reverse aging to the equivalent of 20-something. And there are probably other features of aging that this could not reverse. But it's a major step. Reset a major aging clock.

Vaccine production for Pfizer and Moderna have shown mass production of a vaccine with mRNA delivered by bilipid capsules. The only difference would be the detail strand of mRNA. The vaccines have an mRNA sequence to produce a spike protein for COVID, in the hope the human immune system will produce antibodies to latch onto this protein. Antibodies that trigger the immune system to destroy whatever the antibody is attached to. Instead of mRNA to produce a surface protein for COVID, we could produce mRNA for telomerase. Would that telomerase get into a cell's nucleus to do its job? Or would it only work for a cell that's in the process of division, when the nucleus membrane is dissolved?

Definitely something that could be tested in a lab. It could be tested with cells in a test tube or petri dish. It could be tested with tissue samples. And could be tested with laboratory mice.

This wouldn't stop aging permanently, just one treatment to reverse aging one time. It could be applied more than once, but would only reverse aging each time it's applied.

Clinician_Antilles,

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While most of us are painfully aware of the inevitability of our death, some of us feel that everyone counted amongst the living should focus all of their energy on what they can achieve prior to the hour of their death.