David A. Sinclair Quotes

There is great reason for hope on the not-so-distant horizon, but those battling against the ravages of aging right now must do so in a world in which most doctors have never even thought about why we age, let alone how to treat aging.

And in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead, Bill Gates made no mention of the internet, though he substantially revised it about a year later, humbly admitting that he had “vastly underestimated how important and how quickly” the internet would come to prominence.2

Aging, quite simply, is a loss of information.

I eat a lot of plants and try to avoid eating other mammals, even though they do taste good. If I work out, I will eat meat. • I don't smoke. I try to avoid microwaved plastic, excessive UV exposure, X-rays, and CT scans. • I try to stay on the cool side during the day and when I sleep at night. • I aim to keep my body weight or BMI in the optimal range for healthspan, which for me is 23 to 25.

When sirtuins shift from their typical priorities to engage in DNA repair, their epigenetic function at home ends for a bit. Then, when the damage is fixed and they head back to home base, they get back to doing what they usually do: controlling genes and making sure the cell retains its identity and optimal function.

Analog data are superior for this job because they can be changed back and forth with relative ease whenever the environment within or outside the cell demands it, and they can store an almost unlimited number of possible values, even in response to conditions that have never been encountered before.25 The unlimited number of possible values is why many audiophiles still prefer the rich sounds of analog storage systems. But even though analog devices have their advantages, they have a major disadvantage. In fact, it's the reason we've moved from analog to digital. Unlike digital, analog information degrades over time — falling victim to the conspiring forces of magnetic fields, gravity, cosmic rays, and oxygen. Worse still, information is lost as it's copied. No one was more acutely disturbed by the problem of information loss than Claude Shannon, an electrical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

to lose their identity and become cancerous. And geneticist Nir Barzilai spoke of genetic variants in long-lived humans and his belief that all aging-related diseases can be substantially prevented and human lives can be considerably extended with one relatively easy pharmaceutical intervention.

a few years ago, researchers noticed a curious phenomenon: people taking metformin were living notably healthier lives — independent, it seemed, of its effect on diabetes.16 In

And because aging isn't a disease by the commonly accepted definition, it doesn't fit nicely into the system we've built for funding medical research, drug development, and the reimbursement of medical costs by insurance companies. Words matter. Definitions matter.

Don't be disheartened by my claim that we are the biological equivalent of an old DVD player. This is actually good news. If Szilard had turned out to be right about mutations causing aging, we would not be able to easily address it, because when information is lost without a backup, it is lost for good. Ask anyone who's tried to play or restore content from a DVD that's had an edge broken off: what is gone is gone. But we can usually recover information from a scratched DVD. And if I am right, the same kind of process is what it will take to reverse aging.

Even if they don't recognize its violence, children come to understand the tragedy of death surprisingly early in their lives. By the age of four or five, they know that death occurs and is irreversible.2 It is a shocking thought for them, a nightmare that is real. A "GOOD, LONG LIFE." My grandmother "Vera" sheltered Jews in World War II, lived in primitive New Guinea, and was removed from Bondi Beach for wearing a bikini. The end of her life was hard to watch. "This is just the way it goes," she said. But the person she truly was had been dead many years at that point. At first, because it's calming, most children prefer to think that there are certain groups of people who are protected from death: parents, teachers, and themselves. Between 5 and 7, however, all children come to understand the universality of death. Every family member will die. Every pet. Every plant. Everything they love. Themselves, too.

If you've had your genome analyzed, you can check if you have any of the known variations of FOXO3 that are associated with a long life.40 For example, having a C instead of a T variant at position rs2764264 is associated with longer life. Two of our children, Alex and Natalie, inherited two Cs at this position, one from Sandra and one from me, so all other genes being equal, and as long as they don't live terribly negative lifestyles, they should have greater odds of reaching age 95 than I do, with my one C and one T, and substantially greater than someone with two Ts.

In animal studies, the key to engaging the sirtuin program appears to be keeping things on the razor's edge through calorie restriction — just enough food to function in healthy ways and no more. This makes sense. It engages the survival circuit, telling longevity genes to do what they have been doing since primordial times: boost cellular defenses, keep organisms alive during times of adversity, ward off disease and deterioration, minimize epigenetic change, and slow down aging.

metformin

After our species was almost driven to extinction 74,000 years ago, up until 1900, the human population grew at a rate amounting to a fraction of a percent each year as we expanded to all habitable regions on the planet, breeding with at least two other human species or subspecies. By 1930, thanks to sanitation and decreases in child-mother mortality, our species was increasing its numbers at 1 percent each year. And by 1970, due to immunization and improvements in food production globally, the rate was 2 percent each year. Two percent might not seem like a lot, but it added up fast. It took more than 120 years for our population to move from 1 billion to 2 billion, but after reaching that mark in 1927, it took just thirty-three more years to add another billion and then fourteen years to add another. This is how, at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we came to have more than 7.7 billion people on our planet, and every year one additional person per square kilometer.