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Legend says that in 1518, famed Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce De Leon went looking for the mythical Fountain of Youth in what is now the southern United States. For centuries, stories surrounding the elusive fountain have told of its magical water’s age-reversing properties. While many argue the validity of these claims about Ponce De Leon, he did eventually make a major discovery: the peninsula that eventually became Florida—ironically, a place where many Americans go to live out the later years of their lives.

While the Fountain of Youth remains a tall tale, is it possible, with today’s advances in modern technology, to achieve a similar de-aging effect to what the stories surrounding the fountain claim?

Part 1: The Nature of Aging

Narration: We’re used to thinking that aging is a one-way street. We’re born, we live, and we eventually grow older and pass away. To most of us, aging is just a natural part of life. But some scientists and researchers see it as another problem to solve, and are working on reversing its effects. The truth is, we don’t know exactly what causes the effects of aging and, more importantly, how to prevent them. Some have proposed that entropy—the process of our bodies slowly losing efficiency over time—is the main cause of aging, and there is much to support that theory. This leads to mitochondrial dysfunction—resulting in loss of energy for the body—as well as other disorders and an overall tendency towards disorganization. Along with external factors such as diet and exercise, some believe these are responsible for the collective effect we know as “aging.”

But in 2006, a Japanese stem cell researcher named Shinya Yamanaka made an incredible, Nobel-Prize-winning discovery, bringing into question everything we thought we previously knew about the aging process. Cells are created after the division of a fertilized egg. They continue to divide into identical cells, which eventually mature into more specialized cells over time. For a long time, scientists believed this process to be irreversible. Yamanaka was able to demonstrate, however, that adding four proteins—now known as the Yamanaka factors—to a human adult cell would reprogram it to look and act like a newly-formed cell. This cell could then repeat the process of developing into another type of specialized cell.

This happens because the proteins function by wiping the cell’s epigenetic marks clean, giving it a fresh start. To understand what this means, let’s back up a little bit and look at the fundamentals. Our cells carry information, of which there are two types: genetic and epigenetic. Genetic information is what we received from our parents and is made up of DNA. On top of that is an additional layer of information known as the epigenome. This layer contains instructions that tell the cell how to function; more specifically, how to interact with the right gene at the right time in order to build cells that we need the most. Changes in these epigenetic marks are mainly affected by the way we live our life, such as the food we eat or the type and amount of exercise we participate in. […]