Turns out there's something to it. Fortune's David Stipp recounts the amazing, real story of the scientist and startup that have a shot at making it happen.
By David Stipp, Fortune
January 19 2007: 12:54 PM EST
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- If you haven't heard of resveratrol, you're probably too young to have had the experience of gazing in the bathroom mirror in the morning and thinking, "damn."
Resveratrol is the ingredient in red wine that made headlines in November when scientists demonstrated that it kept overfed mice from gaining weight, turned them into the equivalent of Olympic marathoners, and seemed to slow down their aging process. Few medical discoveries have generated so much instant buzz - even Jay Leno riffed about it in his opening monologue.
But the key question raised by the news - whether the discoveries will lead to pharmaceutical payoffs before we're too old to care - won't be answered in the Harvard lab from which the news sprang. Instead look to a boxy, low-rise building a couple of miles away, an unprepossessing biotech hatchery that got little media attention in the wake of the resveratrol findings. This is the Cambridge home of two-year-old Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. Its stated goal is to develop medicines that have the same health-boosting effects in people that resveratrol had on mice.
