AGEING is as inevitable as death and taxes. And when your skin starts to sag, your hair turns grey and your muscles slowly lose their strength, you can’t help dreaming of forcing the sands of time back up into the hourglass.
Yet before we can hope to stem the flow, let alone reverse it, we need to know just what this sand consists of. Pinning down the molecular changes that underlie the ageing process is not easy. But it has long been suspected that mitochondria, the energy-generating structures within almost every cell of the body, play a key role. And in the past couple of years, researchers have produced strong evidence that this is indeed the case, that the decline of mitochondria determines when our bodies begin to crumble.
And some don’t stop there. The techniques they are developing to cure mitochondrial diseases, they say, might someday allow us to …
