Faster, Please

clipped from pajamasmedia.com In the paper “Spontaneous reversal of the developmental aging of normal human cells following transcriptional reprogramming,” the authors showed that they could effectively reprogram cells to act as if they were young — they could “reset the cell’s clock.” By doing so, they achieved two things. First, they added to the evidence supporting the telomere hypothesis by showing that longer telomeres did in fact seem to indicate a “younger” cell. Second, in a discovery with implications for future stem cell therapies, they demonstrated that by reprogramming cells to have longer telomeres and a higher level of the telomerase enzyme, they could make induced pluripotent stem cells — so-called “adult stem cells,” stem cells created from adult tissues — act more like embryonic stem cells.  This might lead to stem cell research without the ethical issues posed by creating embryonic stem cells from human embryos.