BY investigating the extraordinary case of a 16-year-old girl locked perpetually in the mind and body of a baby, it may be possible to identify the master switch that controls ageing.
Richard Walker of the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa and his team are comparing the DNA of “teen baby” Brooke Greenberg, from Baltimore, Maryland, with that of her three healthy sisters, her parents and standard human DNA sequences in the human genome database. The idea is to track down the gene, or group of genes responsible for ageing.
If such a gene can be found,…
