A Medical Fountain Of Youth?

WOW. If this line of research turns out to be fruitful, we humans may be living a few hundred years instead of 70 odd years on average.

In fact, the cells didn't migrate to any particular tissue after injection into the abdomen.

"This leads us to think that healthy cells secrete factors to create an environment that help correct the dysfunction present in the native stem cell population and aged tissue," Dr. Niedernhofer said. "In a culture dish experiment, we put young stem cells close to, but not touching, progeria stem cells, and the unhealthy cells functionally improved."

Animals that age normally were not treated with stem/progenitor cells, but the provocative findings urge further research, she added. They hint that it might be possible one day to forestall the biological declines associated with aging by delivering a shot of youthful vigor, particularly if specific rejuvenating proteins or molecules produced by the stem cells could be identified and isolated.

Of course there are draw backs to this when one thinks of how we humans reproduce to the point where we're stripping away and destroying our nurturing earth.

But, being an optimist, I tend to think that these types of issues will work themselves out either the easy way or the hard way, and in some future (hopfully ours) humans will have life spans that allow for deeper exploration of space, such that we can spread our DNA to more than one bread basket.