Given that some athletes will take almost anything to gain a one percent edge in performance, what might they do for a 100 percent improvement? That temptation is made somewhat more real by a report today in a leading journal about a drug that doubles the physical endurance of mice running on treadmills. And it could only be more tempting, because the drug in question has also been reported to extend the lifespan of mice.

An ordinary lab mouse will run about one kilometer - five-eights of a mile - on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given resveratrol, a minor component of red wine and other foods, run twice as far. They also have a reduced heart rate and energy-charged muscles, just as trained athletes do, according to an article published online in Cell by Johan Auwerx and his colleagues at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France. "Resveratrol makes you look like a trained athlete without the training," Dr. Auwerx (pronounced OH-wer-ix) said in an interview.

He and his colleagues said the same mechanism seems likely to operate in humans, based on their analysis, in a group of Finnish subjects, of the gene that is influenced by the drug. Their rationale for testing resveratrol was evidence obtained three years ago that it could activate a genetic mechanism known to protect mice against the degenerative diseases of aging and to prolong their lifespan by 30 percent.