Young blood

Jocelyn Kaiser reports in Science magazine,

Back in the 1950s in a weird, vampiric experiment, scientists first showed that connecting the circulatory systems of old and young mice seems to rejuvenate the more elderly animals. A handful of labs have recently been racing to find factors in young blood that may explain this effect. Now, a Harvard University group that claims to have found one such anti-aging protein has published a study countering critics who dismissed the work on the molecule as flawed.

Harvard stem cell biologist Amy Wagers, cardiologist Richard Lee of the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and their colleagues claim that a specific protein, GDF11, may explain young blood’s beneficial effects. They have reported that blood levels of GDF11 drop in mice as the animals get older and that injecting old mice with GDF11 can partially reverse age-related thickening of the heart. In two papers last year in Science, Wagers and collaborators also reported that GDF11 can rejuvenate the rodents’ muscles and brains.

Read more here.

h/t Instapundit