Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

How to Reprogram Aging

6 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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In this segment Ashlee Vance explains a series of experiments that demonstrate how cellular reprogramming can effectively "reboot" the aging process. Researchers took cells from an old animal, reprogrammed them to a youthful epigenetic state, and used cloning technology to generate a new animal that lived a normal lifespan. A Japanese team repeated this cycle 13 times with the same mouse lineage, spanning roughly 20 years. Despite the expectation that irreversible damage would accumulate and shorten lifespan, each reprogrammed mouse lived a typical lifespan, indicating that reprogramming restores the epigenetic configuration to a youthful state and challenges the notion that aging damage is immutable.

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We knew you could take a cell from an old animal, reprogram it back to a youthful state, and then give rise to a whole other animal with a normal life ahead of it. And there's even a group in Japan that used that cloning technology to clone the same animal effectively 13 times in a row. And so you could take an old cell, reprogram it back, give rise to a young animal, wait for that animal to get old, reprogram it back, and do that 13 times. Now mice live 2 years, so that experiment takes about 20. And if aging were somehow immutable, if there was some sort of damage occurring that was totally irreversible, you'd expect that last mouse to be pretty messed up. Than not live a normal life. But instead, what we were able to demonstrate was that just through reprogramming, that animal could live a totally normal lifespan. It's rebooting. It's rebooting. It's restarting at sort of the same epigenetic state, the same use of its genetic instructions that you did when you were young.