Turning back the cell’s clock
Ask Boris Djordjevic how long he plans to live and he says: until the heat death of the universe — and maybe not even then, if we learn to hold entropy off. It is a deliberately science-fiction answer, and he means it. He founded 199 Biotechnologies to chase it.
His bet is partial epigenetic reprogramming, and his reason is clear-eyed rather than hype. Most interventions touch one or two of the hallmarks of ageing; very few touch more than half. Reprogramming, he argues, is one of the only approaches that might reach most of ageing at once, at the cellular level.
What it actually means: turning back the clock of a cell — restoring how it worked when it was young, before the damage of a lifetime of replication. His analogies are for the rest of us: a reboot, a factory reset, reinstalling the operating system while keeping your files.
The mechanism borrows something nature already does. When sperm and egg combine, we begin “old” — and within days there is a burst of de-ageing during embryogenesis, the one moment in human biology where it naturally happens. Shinya Yamanaka won a Nobel Prize for isolating the factors that can drive a cell back toward that youthful state. Reprogramming triggers that program again, deliberately, in a way evolution never planned — the trick being to rewind the clock without erasing the cell’s identity entirely.
He is candid and disarming about his own habits — he “cheats a lot,” eats less well and exercises less than he should, and looks to the biotechnology to find the shortcuts. It is an honest admission from someone whose day job is engineering the shortcut for everyone else.
