Dr. David Sinclair

And they did.

We call them the ICE mice.

ICE stands for Inducible Changes to the Epigenome.

And we were able to induce these changes.

And we took bets in the lab.

This was going back now 12 years ago.

I bet that we would get aging, okay?

But I was the only one in the lab that thought that that would happen.

We had a lot of bets that the mice would die, a lot of bets that the mice would get cancer, and a few said nothing would happen.

But we got aging.

In fact, I was in Australia, where I'm from, as you know,

And I got a picture on my old-style iPhone, and it was a picture of an old mouse.

Well, it was a sick-looking mouse.

And the text was, problem, we have a sick mouse.

And I wrote back, that's not a sick mouse, that's an old mouse.

And that was the first time I realized that we'd had evidence that our theory, the information theory of aging is correct.

So what we did actually, and this might satisfy your and your listeners' curiosity, we generated a mouse from scratch using stem cells.

And so we start with a mouse stem cell that we grow in the lab, in the dish, and we change the genetics of that stem cell so that we could feed it a drug, tamoxifen, which is used in chemotherapy.

And that drug turned on

a gene from a slime mold, something you might find in the forest, that breaks DNA of the mouse, but does it in a way that doesn't cause cancer or mutations, just cuts it and the cells put it back together.