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• Twin Cities

It might be the ultimate free lunch — how to reap all the advantages of a calorically restricted diet — including freedom from disease and an extended healthy life span — without eating less. Just take a drug that tricks the body into thinking it's on such a diet. It sounds too good to be true, and maybe it is. Yet such drugs are now in clinical trials. Even if they should fail, as most candidate drugs do, their development represents a new optimism among research biologists that aging is not immutable, that the body has resources that can be mobilized into resisting disease and averting the adversities of old age. This optimism, however, is not fully shared. Evolutionary biologists, the experts on the theory of aging, have strong reasons to suppose that human life span cannot be altered in any quick and easy way. But they have been confounded by experiments with small laboratory animals, such as roundworms, fruit flies and mice. In all these species, the change of single gen

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