The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

When Benjamin Button was born, people were shocked. He was a tiny newborn, but looked frail and had wrinkles like an old man. The doctors gave him only a short time to live. Contrary to these dire predictions however, Benjamin’s body grew younger and stronger with each year. His frailty, bad sight and bad hearing improved and he learned to walk. Benjamin Button reached adulthood as a middle-aged man and got younger still – until his body turned into that of an adolescent, a child, a toddler and ultimately a baby. He died at the chronological age of 85 years.

The 2008 movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button loosely follows the 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But is there any scientific basis for the fictional Benjamin Button disease? 

While news outlets sometimes report about children who look old and describe them as having “Benjamin Button” disease, none of them ever aged backward the way Benjamin Button did. As a matter of fact, people don’t naturally age backwards. Instead, those children suffer from an extremely rare premature ageing disease called Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS). Despite being children, patients have the appearance and illnesses typical of old age, with wrinkled skin, slowed growth, and hair and fat tissue loss. While healthy at birth, HGPS patients age six times faster than healthy children and have an average life expectancy of only 15 years.

There is currently no cure for HGPS. However, new drugs have recently been developed that can considerably increase life expectancy and improve symptoms. The hope for a cure still remains:  scientists know that HGPS is caused by a single mutation in a gene called lamin A, and are trying to find a way to reverse the mutation using new gene editing technologies. For example, base editing, a technology that can change the genetic code in cells, has been successfully used to cure HGPS in mice and is currently being further characterised.

Since progeria resembles accelerated ageing, research groups at the CHA and worldwide study cells from HGPS patients in the lab to better understand the basic principles of ageing and in turn develop new approaches to cure progeria and help everyone age healthily.