THE MAKING OF THE ICE MOUSE TO TEST IF THE CAUSE OF AGING MIGHT BE INFORMATION LOSS. A gene from a slime mold that encodes an enzyme that cuts DNA at… - David A. Sinclair

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.

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

But consider this: though smoking increases the risk of getting cancer fivefold, being 50 years old increases your cancer risk a hundredfold. By the age of 70, it is a thousandfold