![]() She spent her days gazing through a microscope at cells harvested from patients who had died from aggressive brain tumors, which, as with most forms of cancer, become more likely with age as changes accumulate in a person’s DNA. The summer fellowship program was intended to incubate a new generation of scientists who would dedicate themselves to the organization’s vision.Īs much by accident as by design, Halioua’s summer in California primed her to think more deeply about aging than most teens. Photograph: Joe Puglieseīy the time Halioua started her internship in La Jolla, the foundation was providing small grants to researchers around the world and had labs of its own in Mountain View, directed by de Grey. Now she loves to run across the room and dive into her bed. Louise was rescued with a broken jaw and three working legs. Smitty, who finds tummy tickles calming, likes to curl up under blankets and inside pillowcases. When speaking about 11C’s achievement, de Grey took the opportunity to promote a program he had drawn up called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence that he claimed could eventually defeat aging, allowing a person who was 50 in 2030 to enjoy another 80 healthy years of life. De Grey announced that 11C’s creator had won the first payout from the Methuselah Mouse Prize, a fund of about $33,000 for scientists who set new records for mouse longevity. In 2003, he drew interest to his cause by celebrating a dwarf mouse known as GHR-KO 11C, who died at Southern Illinois University a week short of his fifth birthday-roughly double his expected lifespan-thanks to a tweak similar to what Kenyon had done to extend worm longevity. Naked mole rats and some tortoises appear to slow biological time, making them remarkably resistant to age-related disease.ĭe Grey was inspired by the science but irritated by what he saw as society’s indifference to the prospect of slowing or even reversing aging in humans. DNA repair mechanisms help one of the longest-lived mammals, bowhead whales, live to 200 or more. ![]() The long lives of some wild animals hinted at the possibilities. It was another biological process with genetic controls and components that might one day be hacked. In labs around the world, evidence began to mount that aging was not just inevitable degradation. Intriguingly, some of the same mechanisms they identified in worms could extend life in flies and mice. Kenyon and other researchers tracked down genes linked to longevity and traced the biochemical pathways they controlled. Trained as a professional racer, she competed in five races and never left the gate, so she was fired and picked up by a rescue organization. That alone would be a triumph, but Halioua sees it as a springboard to a still greater feat: creating similar drugs for humans. In a few years, she hopes to have the first commercial drug-for any species-to state on the label that it delays aging or extends lifespan. She has raised around $58 million and has two drugs in development. The company, which she founded in 2019 and leads as CEO, is developing drugs to delay aging in dogs and extend their healthy lifespan. Halioua hopes that the startup whose name is emblazoned on her slim black T-shirt- Loyal-can start to fix this bug in humanity’s 14,000-year-plus wolf bioengineering project. A Chihuahua can expect roughly 15 years of life an Irish wolfhound or Great Dane around seven or eight. It’s the opposite of the wider pattern in the animal kingdom, where elephants easily outlast mice, which in turn outlive mosquitoes. Many dogs can only dream of living as long as he likely will, because dog lifespan is inversely correlated with body size. Subscribe to WIRED Photograph: Joe PuglieseĪ tragedy of human-canine relations is that a 10-year-old dog such as Bocce is old, while a 28-year-old person such as Halioua is in the prime of life. ![]() This article appears in the November 2022 issue.
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