Benjamin Button Mice: Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Have you ever imagined a world in which a mouse infestation was something to look forward to?

Neither had I until this morning.

The Gaurdian reported today that Harvard scientists officially made their most important discovery in history of anti-aging. As published in the journal “Nature,” Ronald DePinho and his colleagues discovered an enzyme therapy that reverses aging in mice, making mangy, blind old rodents young and cute again.

The implication for human beings is pretty titillating for obvious reasons.

Last year my Williamsburg apartment building underwent a historically disgusting mouse infestation. Every unit was contaminated (I’m not some kind of hoarder with old cartons of Thai food rotting under my couch) and the crimes committed by the furry little guys were too numerous to document here. I’ll just say that one Sunday I went to do my laundry only to find that a particularly saucy little fella had chewed through the crotches of all my dirty panties.

Believe it or not, I’m not bragging. My point is that full grown mice are disgusting, disgusting creatures.

This is why finding a treatment to turn them into babies again is a massive development for modern man. Newborn mice look like alien larva, but for a few days, right after baby mice sprout hair and right before they have the faculties to do nasty things like eat my underwear or spread the black plague, they’re not only harmless, but almost shockingly cute.

Here’s what DePinho and his cohorts found: Throughout our young lives our cells divide. Each division causes little caps at the ends of our chromosomes, called telmores, to become slightly shorter.  This snipping process, which is just like a Bris, damages the cell, and when the telmore gets short enough, the cell stops working and dies or enters a suspended state called “senescence.” Oy.

Fortunately, the body creates an enzyme called telomerase that slows this process. When DePinho’s decrepit old mice were treated with injections of telomerase the signs of aging reversed, their organs starting working again, and essentially they grew young like rodent-Benjamin Buttons.

In conclusion: some time in the near future, people all over NYC will view mouse infestations as a rare treat in which they get to play with harmless baby mice. They will also get to create millions of YouTube videos of themselves surprising baby kitties without ever worrying about said kittens getting old and dying.