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 t… - David A. Sinclair

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

Our equivalent of the Lord's Prayer was the English author Alan Alexander Milne's poem "Now We Are Six," which ends: But now I am six, I'm as clever as clever. So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

THE THREE MAIN LONGEVITY PATHWAYS, mTOR, AMPK, AND SIRTUINS, EVOLVED TO PROTECT THE BODY DURING TIMES OF ADVERSITY BY ACTIVATING SURVIVAL MECHANISMS. When they are activated, either by low-calorie or low-amino-acid diets, or by exercise, organisms become healthier, disease resistant, and longer lived. Molecules that tweak these pathways, such as rapamycin, metformin, resveratrol, and NAD boosters, can mimic the benefits of low-calorie diets and exercise and extend the lifespan of diverse organisms.