The age-old quest for the antidote to aging has moved into scientific labs and now into the pages of Nature. David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School today has a paper published online in Nature showing that mice fed a high-calorie diet along with resveratrol, Sinclair’s new drug candidate, had a 30 percent lower risk of death than mice eating the same food but without resveratrol. In fact, the mice on resveratrol had a similar survival rate as mice fed a standard diet and they seemed to be healthier than those on just the high-calorie diet.

A news article in today’s Nature is a pretty skeptical treatment of the findings, listing several caveats, the big one being that the researchers have a long way to go to proving this stuff works in humans.

But Sinclair is working on that. He’s been using himself as a test subject (he’s been taking resveratrol for three years, according to the article) and his startup company, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, based in Cambridge, is already moving into clinical trials.