Legendary synthetic biologist George Church from Harvard Medical School is working on a start-up called Rejuvenate Bio that wants make dogs younger, and someday, maybe apply the same technology to humans.

　　来自哈佛医学院的顶级合成生物学家George Church正在研制一种名为“Rejuvenate Bio”的初创企业，该公司希望能够让狗恢复年轻，有朝一日，该技术也许会应用于人类。

　　In a podcast interview, Church revealed that the company has already experimented on mice, and are testing on dogs now. “Dogs are a market in and of themselves,” Church said at a event last week, according to the MIT Technology Review. “It’s not just a big organism close to humans. It’s something people will pay for, and the FDA process is much faster. We’ll do dog trials, and that’ll be a product, and that’ll pay for scaling up in human trials.”

　　在一次播客采访中，Church透露他们已经在老鼠身上做了实验，现在正在对狗进行测试。据据《麻省理工技术学报》报道，Church在上周的一次活动中说：“狗本身就是市场所在。”“它们不仅仅是与人类相似的大型生物，更重要的是人们愿意为狗花钱，FDA 的相关流程也会更快。我们在狗身上做实验，同时这也可以作为产品，为进一步的人体试验提供资金。。”

　　Previously, age-reversing technology has been tested on worms and flies, whose lifespans can double with a few simple tweaks to their genes. In mammals like mice, blood transfusions from younger mice can restore biomarkers to youthful levels in older mice.

　　在此之前，已经在蠕虫和苍蝇身上进行了年龄逆转技术测试，它们的寿命可以通过对其基因进行一些简单的调整来增加一倍。在像老鼠这样的哺乳动物中，向年长的老鼠输入年轻老鼠的血液可以使其生物标志恢复到年轻水平。

　　Rejuvenate wants to start by extending the lifespans of Cocker spaniels and Doberman pinschers, who are prone to fatal heart diseases like ailment mitral valve disease, which kills about half of Cavalier King Charles spaniels by age 10. Though Rejuvenate hasn’t revealed what exactly its dog therapy involves, it might be similar to a form of gene therapy used to stop heart damage in mice. Church’s Harvard lab has worked through over 60 different therapies to modify two genes that act on four major diseases of aging (heart and kidney disease, obesity, and diabetes). According to Church, the results have been “pretty eye-popping.”

　　Rejuvenate Bio目的是延长可卡犬和杜宾犬的寿命，这类狗容易患上致命的心脏疾病，比如一种名为“骑士查理王小猎犬”约有一半会在10岁因为一种心脏二尖瓣疾病夭折。Rejuvenate Bio还没有公开其狗狗治疗的具体内容，但可能包括类似 Davidsohn 在小鼠身上治疗心脏损伤的治疗。Church的哈佛实验室开始研究一系列基因治疗，包括超过 60 个不同的基因，通过修饰 2 个基因作用于 4 项衰老相关的疾病：心衰、肾衰、肥胖和糖尿病。据 Church 表示，研究结果“相当令人吃惊”。

　　What distinguishes disease prevention from age reversal, according to Church, is whether an old dog’s body can heal like a young one. Reversing aging on pets raises lots of ethical questions, of course. What are the ethical boundaries of experimenting on pets? What if a longer life span means other, negative health tradeoffs, or simply unexpected side effects and experiments gone wrong? And what if pets end up outliving their owners? For now, though, Rejuvenate Bio has to prove that it can actually accomplish its lofty (and potentially life-changing) goals.

　　根据Church的说法，疾病预防与年龄逆转的区别在一只老狗的身体是否能像年轻小狗一样愈合。当然，改变宠物的衰老会引发很多伦理问题。在宠物身上试验的伦理界限是什么?如果延长寿命意味着其他的、负面的健康权衡，或者仅仅是意想不到的副作用抑或是实验出错了怎么办?如果宠物最终比它们的主人活得还久又会出现什么问题?不过，就目前而言，Rejuvenate Bio必须证明它确实能够实现其崇高的(并可能改变人生的)目标。