David A. Sinclair Quotes

1800, the global literacy rate was 12 percent, by 1900 it was 21 percent, and today it's 85 percent.

We'd die quite quickly without amino acids, the organic compounds that serve as the building blocks for every protein in the human body. Without them — and in particular the nine essential amino acids that our bodies cannot make on their own — our cells can't assemble the life-giving enzymes needed for life.

Youth → broken DNA → genome instability → disruption of DNA packaging and gene regulation (the epigenome) → loss of cell identity → cellular senescence → disease → death.

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.

Over fifty years, Goldman estimated, the potential economic benefits of delayed aging would add up to more than $7 trillion in the United States alone. And that's a conservative estimate, based on modest improvements in the percentages of older people living without a disease or disability. Whatever the dollar figure, though, the benefits "would accrue rapidly," Goldman's team wrote, "and would extend to all future generations,"

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

Trading reproduction for repair, the sirtuins order our bodies to "buckle down" in times of stress and protect us against the major diseases of aging: diabetes and heart disease, Alzheimer's disease and osteoporosis, even cancer. They mute the chronic, overactive inflammation that drives diseases such as atherosclerosis, metabolic disorders, ulcerative colitis, arthritis, and asthma. They prevent cell death and boost mitochondria, the power packs of the cell. They go to battle with muscle wasting, osteoporosis, and macular degeneration. In studies on mice, activating the sirtuins can improve DNA repair, boost memory, increase exercise endurance, and help the mice stay thin, regardless of what they eat. These are not wild guesses as to their power; scientists have established all of this in peer-reviewed studies published in journals such as Nature, Cell, and Science.

The tragedy of the commons is that humans are not very good at taking personal action to solve collective problems. The trick to revolutionary change is finding ways to make self-interest align with the common good. For people to accept widespread biometric tracking in a way that could help us get ahead of fast-moving deadly viruses, they'll need to be offered something they have a hard time seeing themselves without.

The way doctors treat illness today "is simple," wrote S. Jay Olshansky, a demographer at the University of Illinois. "As soon as a disease appears, attack that disease as if nothing else is present; beat the disease down, and once you succeed, push the patient out the door until he or she faces the next challenge; then beat that one down. Repeat until failure."

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.

That's what people have been doing for centuries — without even knowing it — in centenarian-heavy places such as Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Sardinia, Italy. These are, you might recognize, some of the places the writer Dan Buettner introduced to the world as so-called Blue Zones starting in the mid-2000s. Since that time, the primary focus for those seeking to apply lessons from these and other longevity hot spots has been on what Blue Zone residents eat. Ultimately this resulted in the distillation of "longevity diets" that are based on the commonalities in the foods eaten in places where there are lots of centenarians. And overwhelmingly that advice comes down to eating more vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, while consuming less meat, dairy products, and sugar.

Yes, humans are separated from yeast by a billion years of evolution, but we still have a lot in common. S. cerevisiae shares some 70 percent of our genes.

In the same way that genetic information is stored as DNA, epigenetic information is stored in a structure called chromatin.

you were a member of the American upper middle class in the 1970s, you weren't just enjoying a more affluent life, you had a longer one, too. Those in the top half of the economy were living an average of 1.2 more years than those in the bottom half. By the early 2000s, the difference had increased dramatically. Those in the upper half of the income spectrum could expect nearly six additional years of life, and by 2018, the divide had widened, with the richest 10 percent of Americans living thirteen more years of life than the poorest 10 percent.40

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.