Scientists are working on a pill that will replicate the benefits of hard physical exertion without you having to break a sweat – and they are increasingly close to succeeding. But can your workout really be reduced to the sum of its parts? And do we want to become a nation of armchair Olympians? MH investigates
It was late summer, and the grey towers of the Salk Institute in San Diego shaded seamlessly into ocean fog. The marble-paved central courtyard was deserted; the south lawn, too, was lifeless. But through the vents built into its concrete border, you could detect a slight ammoniac whiff from the 2,000 or so cages of laboratory rodents below. In a teak-lined office overlooking the ocean, the biologist Ronald Evans introduced me to two specimens: Couch Potato Mouse and Lance Armstrong Mouse.
Couch Potato Mouse had been raised to serve as a proxy for the out-of-shape Everyman. Its daily exercise was limited to an occasional waddle towards a bowl brimming with pellets of laboratory standard “Western Diet”, which consists of fat and sugar and tastes like cookie dough. The mouse was lethargic, with rolls of fat visible beneath its thinning fur.
Lance Armstrong Mouse had been raised under the same conditions, yet its body was lean and taut, its mind alert. The secret to its youthful energy, Evans explained, was a daily dose of GW501516 (or 516 for short) – a drug that confers some of the benefits of exercise without the recipient needing to move a muscle.
Mice love to run, Evans told me. When he puts a wheel in their cage, they typically log several miles a night. For the rodents, these nocturnal drills are not simply a way of dealing with the stress of laboratory life. When scientists left a training wheel in the corner of an urban park, their camera footage showed it was in near-constant use by wild mice. Even though their daily activities – foraging for food, avoiding predators – provided a more than adequate workout, the mice chose to run. (Several slugs also made use of the amenity, possibly by accident.)
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