Aging is complex, with lots of interacting parts. A new field called “systems biology” can give us a more accurate picture of how aging works and maybe we can get closer to a cure.

We can think of a cell as a tiny submarine with thousands of little crewmen (proteins) all working together to make it work. That’s the weird ‘comic’ at the top. We have known they were in there, but we couldn’t really see them working together like this, so it was hard to make sense of it. We knew which one was the captain, and which one operated the engines, and which one operated the sensors. But how, exactly, do they all communicate? What we need is something like the “org chart” for the whole crew.

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