David A. Sinclair Quotes

simply keeping people alive — decades after their lives have become defined by pain, disease, frailty, and immobility — is no virtue.

Using your nondominant hand, write your name, address, and phone number while circling your opposite foot counterclockwise.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool." R. P. Feynman,

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.

Separating aging from disease obfuscates a truth about how we reach the ends of our lives: though it's certainly important to know why someone fell from a cliff, it's equally important to know what brought that person to the precipice in the first place. Aging brings us to the precipice. Give any of us 100 years or so, and it brings us all there. In

We can't prevent all DNA damage — and we wouldn't want to because it's essential for the function of the immune system and even for consolidating our memories57 — but we do want to prevent extra damage. And there's a lot of extra damage to be had out there. Cigarettes, for starters. There aren't many legal vices out there that are worse for your epigenome than the deadly concoction of thousands of chemicals smokers put into their bodies every day. There's a reason why smokers seem to age faster: they do age faster. The DNA damage that results from smoking keeps the DNA repair crews working overtime, and likely the result is the epigenetic instability that causes aging. And although I'm not likely to be the first person you'll hear this from, it nonetheless bears repeating: smoking is not a private, victimless activity. The levels of DNA-damaging aromatic amines in cigarette smoke are about fifty to sixty times as high in secondhand as in firsthand smoke.58 If you do smoke, it is worth trying to quit.

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.

But the true extent to which the survival circuit is conserved between yeast and humans wasn't fully known until 2017, when Eva Bober's team at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim, Germany, reported that sirtuins stabilize human rDNA.23 Then, in 2018, Katrin Chua at Stanford University found that, by stabilizing human rDNA, sirtuins prevent cellular senescence — essentially the same antiaging function as we had found for sirtuins in yeast twenty years earlier.24

And that's the world's biggest problem: the future is seen as someone else's concern.

Do your part to make humanity be the best it can be. Don't waste a moment. Embrace your youth; hold on to it for as long as you can. Fight for it. Fight for it. Never stop fighting for it.

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.

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.

We also knew that many other health-promoting molecules, and chemical derivatives of them, are produced in abundance by stressed plants; we get resveratrol from grapes, aspirin from willow bark, metformin from lilacs, epigallocatechin gallate from green tea, quercetin from fruits, and allicin from garlic. This, we believe, is evidence of xenohormesis — the idea that stressed plants produce chemicals for themselves that tell their cells to hunker down and survive.

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."