Wizard Science

At the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, microbiologists have found the closest approach yet to the Elixir of Life. It's called telemerase. In ordinary cells, the intertwined strands of DNA are capped by telemeres. These segments wear away each time a cell divides; and once the telemeres have gone, the DNA can fray and the cell dies. In the lab, the researchers have added their Elixir to cultured human cells, and watched them divide over and over, without ever dying.

If human cells don't die out as individuals, then our bodies as a whole will not age. There's accidental damage to cells, too, of course. Radiation or free radicals in the body can disrupt the DNA. But new research at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley offers a second ingredient for the Elixir.

The researchers are studying a microbe that can withstand huge doses of radiation. Blast deinococcus radiodurans with radiation and its DNA will break up. Switch off the radiation, and enzymes in the cells stitch the DNA together again. Genetically modifying our cells could provide with a toolkit for repairing DNA damage throughout an immortal lifetime.

Transmutation and the Philosopher's Stone

Apart from the Elixir of Life, our wizard has a second wonderful potion: the Philosopher's Stone. This powerful substance could transmute everyday substances into the precious.

Today, scientists routinely turn coal into diamonds. It involves a giant press, where carbon dust is dissolved in liquid iron. Here they can make diamonds up to a quarter of an inch across. (The process was pioneered in the mid-1950s, though it's recently emerged that the very first and much trumpeted 'artificial diamond' was in fact a natural diamond that had fallen into the molten metal!)

The main dream of the alchemists was to transmute the 'base metal' lead into gold. At the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California, this is old hat. Every day, they turn lead not just into gold, but into elements that the alchemists never dreamed of. Gold is element number 79; the heaviest element found naturally is uranium, clocking in at 92; but the Berkeley alchemists have now made 18 new elements, right up to number 118.

Across the continent, on Long Island, scientists have moved on one step from the alchemists. They are transmuting gold atoms into ectoplasm - the raw material from which the Universe was born. In the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, they smash two gold atoms together to make a concentrated ball of energy, at a temperature of a trillion degrees. This glue-ball resembles the early Universe ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang.

Chimeras