This geneticist’s age-reversal tech could help restore sight

As he steps outside the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his aviator glasses darken automatically in the sun. Age-related blindness runs in his family. A great-aunt in China, the story goes, was killed crossing a road because she couldn’t see oncoming traffic.

And Lu’s own 23andMe test came back with a mutation for macular degeneration, a top cause of vision loss in old age. Exposure to bright sunlight is another risk factor—thus the shades. Lu is behind one of the coolest results in rejuvenation science—and in eye research.

In 2018, while earning his PhD at Harvard Medical School, he used an age-reversal technique called reprogramming to repair the optic nerves of mice. He crushed the nerves, blinding the animals, and then injected the cells with a gene therapy meant to restore them to a youthful state. Sixteen days later, the nerves were growing back, their axons showing up through a microscope as spidery orange filaments.

As hype around age reversal swirls, Lu has been busy in the lab searching for what he calls “the next generation of rejuvenation therapies.” The head of that lab, the longevity scientist David Sinclair, remembers when Lu texted him the pictures: “He asked me, ‘What do you see here?’ And I said, ‘I see the future.’” Later tests carried out in a box with rotating bars of light showed the mice were tracking the changes. This year, nearly the exact genetic therapy Lu created for mice entered human clinical trials. On June 9, the startup Life Biosciences, which Sinclair cofounded and in which Lu owns a small stake, announced it had injected the treatment into the eye of a person with glaucoma.

The trial has been big news. A headline in the New York Times suggested the technology could “change humanity.” Posters on X gushed, with one declaring that “the fountain of youth is here.” “It’s remarkable that what he developed as a student is now going into humans,” says Sinclair of the treatment, now called ER-100. It’s why babies are born young, not old: The DNA they’ve inherited from their parents has been scrubbed and reset.

In 2006, Japanese researchers showed they could cause the process to occur in the lab by introducing just four key genes, known by the acronym OSKM. Add these to a cell from a 100-year-old and it will turn into a stem cell that acts as if it was plucked from an embryo. But we don’t want to turn people into blobs of stem-cell protoplasm.