One of the key promoters of this idea [cellular reprogramming], Richard Klausner, took the stage in June at a glitzy, $4,000-per-ticket retreat in San Diego, where he flashed data from unpublished experiments in which sick mice bounced back to health after undergoing the experimental treatment.
Klausner was pitching nothing less than “medical rejuvenation”—a means of taking old animals and making them “young.” He is the organizer and chief scientist of Altos Labs, a new research company seeded with more than $3 billion from ultra-wealthy figures in Silicon Valley and oil money from the Persian Gulf. Klausner and his financiers had swept up dozens of top scientists—offering salaries of $1 million and more—and set them to work on a technology the company now calls “rejuvenation programming.”
It seems to work at least in part by resetting what’s called the epigenome—chemical marks on DNA that control which genes are turned on, or off, in a cell.
But…
so far no research group or company has reported normal mice living longer after being exposed to partial reprogramming. And that’s something you might expect them to do, if the alchemy is real.