科学家们可能已经破解了细胞长寿的秘密

科学家们可能已经破解了细胞长寿的秘密

Do you want to live forever? Well, maybe not forever, but for a long, long, long time? An international group of scientists from several universities has announced an exciting breakthrough in boosting lifespan. In fact, their work has resulted in an organism living five times longer than it normally would have. This is obviously incredibly exciting. The only problem? This “fountain of youth” only applies to worms.

你想永远活下去吗?嗯，也许不是永远，但很长、很长、很长时间?来自几所大学的一个国际科学家小组宣布了一项令人兴奋的延长寿命的突破。事实上，他们的工作已经使一种生物的寿命比正常情况下长了五倍。这显然是非常令人兴奋的。唯一的问题吗?这种“青春之泉”只适用于蠕虫。

The scientists involved in the study worked with a species of nematode worm known as C. elegans., mining its cells in search of the keys to a long life. After performing a couple of special tweaks to the cellular pathways of the worms, the researchers were able to boost their lifespan by around 500%.

参与这项研究的科学家研究了一种名为秀丽隐杆线虫的线虫。为了寻找长寿的钥匙，科学家们对其细胞进行了挖掘。在对蠕虫的细胞路径进行了一些特殊的调整之后，研究人员能够将它们的寿命延长约500%。

Toying with the cellular pathways of organisms has shown promise for extending lifespan, but the results of this research are still surprising. You see, the researchers actually combined two separate mutations that have been shown to elongate life. One of the modified pathways was expected to double the lifespan of the worm, while the other was expected to extend its life by around 30%.

玩弄生物体的细胞通路已经显示出延长寿命的希望，但这项研究的结果仍然令人惊讶。你看，研究人员实际上结合了两种不同的突变，这两种突变被证明可以延长寿命。其中一种改造后的途径预计将使蠕虫的寿命延长一倍，而另一种途径预计将使其寿命延长约30%。

An increase in lifespan of 130% is nothing to sneeze at, of course, but the results were even better than the scientists could have hoped. The two mutations seemed to combine, with a synergistic effect that resulted in an increase in lifespan of around 500%.

当然，130%的寿命增长是不容小觑的，但结果比科学家们所希望的还要好。这两种突变似乎结合在一起，产生了协同效应，导致寿命延长了约500%。

This is some seriously incredible news, but unfortunately, it’s still unclear exactly why these two cellular tweaks combined to have such a shocking effect.

这是一些非常令人难以置信的消息，但不幸的是，我们仍然不清楚为什么这两种细胞调整结合在一起会产生如此惊人的效果。

“The synergistic extension is really wild,” Jarod A Rollins, co-lead author, said in a statement. “The effect isn’t one plus one equals two, it’s one plus one equals five. Our findings demonstrate that nothing in nature exists in a vacuum; in order to develop the most effective anti-aging treatments we have to look at longevity networks rather than individual pathways.”

该研究报告的共同作者加洛德?罗林斯在一份声明中说:“这种协同效应的扩展真的很疯狂。”“其效果不是一加一等于二，而是一加一等于五。我们的发现表明，自然界中没有任何东西是存在于真空中的;为了开发最有效的抗衰老疗法，我们必须着眼于长寿网络，而不是单个途径。”

Now, before you go dreaming of a pill that could make you live five times longer, you should know that we’re far from even considering the possibility of experimenting with such things in humans. Sometimes it pays to be a worm.

现在，在你梦想一种能让你多活五倍的药丸之前，你应该知道，我们甚至还远远没有考虑在人类身上试验这种东西的可能性。有时做一只虫子是值得的。