These mice went from couch potatoes to marathon runners with an exercise drug
Lots of ideas for receiving the benefits of exercise without actually, you know, exercising have come and gone in the last 50 years. So it’s worth being a little skeptical about this one: mice, when given a certain molecule, could run 100 minutes longer without any training.
The usual caveats apply: this is a mouse study, and we haven’t tested the drug in humans. But scientists hope that this compound — called GW1516, or GW for short — can be turned into a medicine that provides benefits for people who have trouble exercising. (By this, they mean people who have heart conditions or other physical limitations, not just the lazy among us.)
What’s exciting here, though, is that GW comes from our knowledge of genetics. See, scientists a…