the Royal Society. Founded in the 1600s during the Age of Enlightenment and formerly headed by Australia's catalyst, the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, a… - David A. Sinclair

In 2003, Michael McBurney from the University of Ottawa in Canada discovered that mouse embryos manipulated to be unable to produce one of the seven sirtuin enzymes, SIRT1, couldn't last past the fourteenth day of development — about two-thirds of the way into a mouse's gestation period.26 Among the reasons, the team reported in the journal Cancer Cell, was an impaired ability to respond to and repair DNA damage.

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

The problem is not just population, it's consumption. And it's not just consumption, it's waste. In comes the food; out goes the effluent. In come the fossil fuels; out go the carbon emissions. In come the petrochemicals; out goes the plastic. On average, Americans consume more than three times the amount of food they need to survive and about 250 times as much water.14 In return, they produce 4.4 pounds of trash each day, recycling or composting only about of a third of it.15 Thanks to things such as cars, planes, big homes, and power-hungry clothes dryers,16 the annual carbon dioxide emissions of an average American are five times as high as the global average. Even the "floor" — below which even monks living in American monasteries typically do not go — is twice the global average.