What if I told you there was a pill that slows aging and allows you to live a healthy life to age 100?

Such a pill may exist right now. It's being tested in people in very early-stage human clinical trials. Today, the company making the pill, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, announced its findings from preclinical testing in cells and animals, and also from tests conducted on 85 male volunteers this summer.

The verdict: so far, the pill works, although it will be years before we know how well it works, or if it can actually extend the life span of people in the same way that it has bumped up the life span of mice.

Speaking today at the Annual Metabolic Diseases Drug Discovery and Development World Summit in San Diego, Sirtris's senior director of biology, Jill Milne, announced that the drug, SRT501, reduces glucose and improves insulin sensitivity in animal and in vitro studies of the drug's effect on type 2 diabetes. In people, the drug was tested for dose, safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetics--that is, how well the drug was absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and removed from the body.

Phase 1b trials are already under way to test safety and pharmacokinetics on patients with type 2 diabetes. Later-phase trials will test to see if the drug actually works in diabetics.

SRT501 is a proprietary chemical developed by Sirtris that's based on the naturally occurring resveratrol that company cofounder David Sinclair of Harvard University has been studying for its effects in extending life span in a number of organisms, including yeast, flies, and mice. Last year, Sinclair created a sensation when he published a paper in Nature detailing how mice on a high-fat diet that were fed large doses of resveratrol were as healthy as mice on a regular diet. Resveratrol also sharply extended life span, produced positive changes in insulin sensitivity and other diabetes-preventing mechanisms, and increased energy production in cells. The mice were given very high doses of resveratrol--22 milligrams per kilogram of weight. In comparison, a liter of red wine delivers 1.5 to 3 milligrams. To match the results in the mice, a 150-pound human would need to drink 750 to 1,500 bottles of wine a day.

Sinclair says that SRT501 is a thousand times more potent than naturally occurring resveratrol, which gives it the same punch as the resveratrol in all those bottles of wine.

Sinclair believes that resveratrol activates a gene called SIRT-1, which is associated with the regulation of life span in several animals. This contention is disputed by some critics: they argue that the mechanism by which resveratrol works is still poorly understood.

Because humans are so long-lived, SRT501 can't be easily tested for longevity in humans--nor does the Food and Drug Administration recognize "increased life span" as an allowable indication for an approved drug. This is why Sirtris is testing SRT501 for diseases related to aging, such as type 2 diabetes. However, should the drug be approved for diabetes, it will undoubtedly be used to extend life span by many people without diabetes.

The drug still has years of testing to go and faces many hurdles. It may not work. But if it does, the consequences will be profound. For instance, it will mean that more people will be alive on the earth. Age 90 will be the new 70, and 70 the new 50, with profound impacts on everything from social security to retirement age. It may also mean fewer people with diabetes, Alzheimer's, and some cancers.

Can one pill do and cause all that? Critics have long said no--that such a compound will not work in humans. But they also said it wouldn't work in mice--until it did work. (At least in fat mice.)

So let's sip some pinot noir and wait for more results from Sirtris. After all, we're not getting any younger.

Look for my profile of longevity researcher David Sinclair in the September/October issue of Technology Review.

Sirtris press release

A new hand: The i-LIMB hand is a prosthetic device with five individually powered fingers to give users a prosthesis that comes very close to looking and acting like a real human hand. Credit: Touch Bionics

A new bionic hand is now available that, for the first time, allows users to operate the fingers independently, using the muscles in the remaining part of their arm. The fingers also have an increased level of sensitivity that enables the user to pick up a Styrofoam cup with little effort, or a business card off a table. A skinlike coating makes the hand feel and look more human than other artificial hands.

The new hand, called the i-LIMB, is made by United Kingdom-based Touch Bionics. The company plans to unveil the device at the 12th World Congress of the International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics in Vancouver, Canada, held from July 29 through August 3. According to the company's website,

"The i-LIMB Hand is controlled by a unique, highly intuitive control system that uses a traditional two-input myoelectric (muscle signal) to open and close the hand's life-like fingers. Myoelectric controls utilize the electrical signal generated by the muscles in the remaining portion of the patient's limb. This signal is picked up by electrodes that sit on the surface of the skin. Existing users of basic myoelectric prosthetic hands are able to quickly adapt to the system and can master the device's new functionality within minutes."

The hand is already being used by soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan by improvised explosive devices (IEDs). A few months ago, I attended a dinner in New York sponsored by the Wounded Warriors, a group that supports soldiers wounded in the line of duty, and I was able to see a next-generation prosthetic arm. A major focus of the Warriors is to provide soldiers, who have lost arms, legs, or both, with prosthetic limbs, therapy sessions, and services to meet their needs.

Much to my surprise, a uniformed marine at my table was missing part of an arm and both legs. I say I was surprised because he walked and interacted normally. Although I noticed that his hand was artificial--it was made out of white plastic--he used it almost like a real human hand to eat, pick up things, and greet others. When I shook his hand, I could tell it was metal and plastic, but the grip felt natural.

I don't remember the marine's name, but I am truly amazed by his courage. He had been a sniper in Iraq and was wounded when his lightly armored Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb. Far from angry or bitter, he was recently married and is able to water-ski and participate in other sports and activities. At the time I spoke with him, he was gung ho about life.

Fortunately, those who are wounded and lose limbs during combat now have the benefit of advanced electronics, materials, and biotech to provide them with prosthetics like none ever seen before. Tragically, many more soldiers may need them before the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is finished.

If we ever find aliens on other planets, they might look like Romulans or Wookies, though it's far more likely that extraterrestrial creatures will eat acid and breathe methane. They may have genetic codes containing six, eight, or twelve nucleotides instead of the four we have here on Earth--or they may operate with systems entirely different than DNA.

Life may be so bizarre beyond our world that we may not even recognize it, says a new report from the National Academy's National Research Council. The authors found that life as it commonly exists on Earth--based on being biosolvent in liquid water, requiring a carbon-based metabolism, and having a molecular system that evolves and the ability to exchange energy with the environment--is not the only basis for life elsewhere in the universe.

The report, commissioned by NASA as part of its mission to search for life in outer space, suggests that astrobiologists turn their eyes toward Earth to study creatures found in its extreme environments.

"It is critical to know what to look for in the search for life in the solar system," said committee chair John Baross, a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, Seattle, in a press release about the report. "The search so far has focused on Earth-like life because that's all we know, but life that may have originated elsewhere could be unrecognizable compared with life here. Advances throughout the last decade in biology and biochemistry show that the basic requirements for life might not be as concrete as we thought."

While some of this may seem obvious--that life might be different in outer space--this report adds yet another reason to explore life in extreme places on Earth, such as volcanic vents and deserts that resemble conditions on Mars and other planets. In metagenomics, there are scientists putting their efforts toward finding bacteria that employ novel methods to store and use energy that might be mimicked by humans.

The report suggests that space missions and exploration should be aimed at more than just planets where conditions seem most favorable to Terran life. Likewise, probes should be built to look for exotic evidence of life-forms. For instance, Titan, one of Saturn's moons, seems to have liquid mixtures of water and ammonia that might contain life, according to the committee.

Perhaps most interesting is the report's suggestion that humans who most often think geocentrically might gain a better understanding of fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of life. This kind of thinking may also hasten the discovery of life beyond our small planet. These life-forms may not speak to us in a low growl like Chewbacca, but they will most likely reveal a great deal about the nature of life, including our own.