The Mouse AGEMAP
Via EurekAlert!, a hint of what the next generation of analysis and discovery in aging research will look like: "The study [uses] a newly available database called AGEMAP to document the process of aging in mice at the molecular level. ... Both changes in tissues and cellular damage lead to changes in gene expression, and thus probing which genes change expression in old age can lead to insights about the process of aging itself. ... some tissues (such as the thymus, eyes and lung) show large changes in which genes are active in old age whereas other tissues (such as liver and cerebrum) show little or none, suggesting that different tissues may degenerate to different degrees in old mice. ... there are three distinct patterns of aging, [and] tissues can be grouped according to which aging pathway they take. This result indicates that there are three different clocks for aging that may or may not change synchronously, and that an old animal may be a mixture of tissues affected by each of the different aging clocks. Finally, the report compares aging in mice to aging in humans. Several aging pathways were found to be the same, and these could be interesting because they are relevant to human aging and can also be scientifically studied in mice." To repair the machinery you must know the machinery.
Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-11/plos-amm112807.php