The Longevity Gene A professor of biology named Leonard Guarente has made it his life's work to discover and pinpoint the existence of the mysterious longevity gene.
With his mice experiments, he's made believers out of many people, including the very most skeptical onlookers of the project.
He has compiled videos of mice that are about 29 months old, some have the gene, some do not.
Those who do not have the gene appear to be older, aged and in a lot of arthritic pain.
The mice that have the gene are springing around the cage, thin and with more energy than ever.
So, how is the gene activated? The answer is caloric restriction.
However the energy boost is not the only advantage to such a diet.
The mice with the restricted diet also, on average, live about 30-35% longer than their counterparts.
they are also much less likely to develop all kinds of diseases that are related to aging, cancer being one of them.
It has been known by the scientific community that caloric reduction diets tend to extend the span of life of many different kinds of mammals, some by as much as 50%.
However, what was not known was how exactly this was happening.
In other words, again and again the same conclusions were reached, but the exact reason seemed to evade scientists.
Guarente is one of those scientists, only now he believes he may have found that elusive answer.
He also believes that with more funding, this research could eventually benefit people.
Guarente has made it his life's work to discover the secret to anti-aging in mammals.
Recently, he found that a calorie restriction diet activates a gene called SIRT1 which slows the aging process.
Because of this, Guarente has also been positive that an anti-aging medicine will be released on the drug market within the next decade.
At the beginning, not many scientists knew just how to tackle this conundrum.
At first, the hypothesis was simply that if a person ate less, all of their bodily functions slowed down, including aging.
Guarente decided to test for possible causes of the genetic variety to try and explain the phenomenon.
Try as he might, as hard as he searched, the mystery deepened.
Some results would be promising and others would be an utter disappointment.
After a few more years, Guarente and his team of researchers were finally able to tie the longevity of the mammals they were studying to one gene.
That one gene was SIRT1.
Their subjects, when slipped extra copies of the gene, were living longer, aging slower and showing very positive effects.
By the time the year 2000 rolled around, the same gene was pinpointed in worms, then yeast, and it was working in the exact same manner.
Soon, it was found that not only was this gene found in yeast and worms, but it was also found in the human genome, which was a huge piece of the puzzle.
Note: Resveratrol has been proven also to stimulate the SIRT 1 gene without calorie restriction.
It has now been located in mice.
In the experiments, Guarente has been able to definitively tie the existence and activation of the SIRT1 gene to caloric reduction diets.
It works by producing proteins that turn off opposing genes that will help a body to store large amounts of fat.
The fat released by SIRT1 is then able to travel to tissues elsewhere in the body, thereby being burned off.
The mice were, because of this function, much leaner and younger looking.
However, they are still not positive exactly why the aging process is slowed by this function of the gene.
They continue testing and getting ever closer to the answer to this so-called 'youth gene'.