In 1996, cryobiologist Gregory Fahy walked into his physician's office and talked his way into a month's supply of growth hormone. His hope, bolstered by a single study in rats1, was that the injections would help him to regrow his thymus ' a peculiar immune organ that atrophies and practically disappears as people age. Regenerating it, Fahy thought, would help him to live a longer, healthier life. The improvement was obvious, at least according to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, Fahy says. His functional thymic mass nearly doubled2. Whether it made him feel any younger, however, was less clear. 'I was only 46 at the time, and more or less in peak health,' he says, although subsequent attempts to regrow the tissue left him feeling 'energized and invincible'. What started as an unregulated self-experiment has developed into a series of small clinical trials run by a biopharmaceutical company called Intervene Immune in Torrance, California, at which Fahy is chief scientific...
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