#245 Re: Dr David Sinclair on How to Slow Down Aging and Live Longer

David Sinclair (0:00)

You can actually reset not just the apparent age of the animal, but the biological age, their functional age. So when we do that in the eye of the mouse, we deliver a set of three genes, and we turn them on, and we don't just see the clock go back, we also see that the mice get their vision back.

They can see again, and those nerves are young again.

They don't just look young, they are literally young. If we can restore vision in old mice, what else can we reverse?

Siim Land (0:27)

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Dr. Sinclair, welcome to the show.

David Sinclair (0:57)

Hi, Siim. Thanks for having me on.

Siim Land (0:59)

Yeah, it's great to have you on the show. And I've been looking at your research and scientific accomplishments online for quite a while. And it's great to kind of meet face to face as close as possible.

David Sinclair (1:11)

Yeah, it's great to be on. Thanks.

Siim Land (1:13)

All right.

You've been doing, you know, research. You've been researching aging for quite a while now. What got you into this field of research in the first place?

David Sinclair (1:24)

Well, the first memory I have of thinking about aging is when I was four years old. Most of us at four realized that aging will happen and our parents will die, our pets will die. So that was troubling. I didn't get serious about it until the end of high school. And then I went to college to get a degree in genetics to tackle what I think is the most important problem that we have.

If we solve this problem, if people can live an extra 10, 20, 30 years longer without getting sick, then that's trillions of dollars we can use to do other things.

Siim Land (1:59)

Yeah, it's so true in the sense that people, as they get older and they're also their productivity and happiness tends to decline in some aspects as well. They become less functional and it's kind of a unique perspective of looking at, okay, if we fix the aging problem or alleviate the negative side effects of it, then we don't even have to try to fix the symptoms of everything else that aging causes.

David Sinclair (2:25)

Exactly. In the future, when this all comes true, and it's not that far away, people will look back at today and say, can you believe they were trying to cure diseases after they happened, after it was too late?

This is a different approach about not just understanding why we fall off a cliff and die, but what gets us to that cliff in the first place.

Siim Land (2:44)

Yeah, that's true.

You write about it quite extensively in your new book, Lifespan. And you also give like an amazing overview about all these theories and ideas about why we age in the first place. So maybe can you give us like, what's the kind of overview about like, what's the current state of research in anti-aging?

David Sinclair (3:07)

Yeah, sure. Well, we've gone through phases every 10 years, there's a new phase, and we're just about to enter a new one. In the early 2000s, we were excited about longevity genes, controlling our body survival and connecting that to dieting and exercise.

And we can talk about that later, there's a lot in my book about why exercising and fasting is good for you.

But in the last few years, there's been a real breakthrough in understanding the fundamental reasons that cause aging. And we've declared that there are about eight hallmarks of aging, things that go wrong in our body that need to be fixed if we're going to live a lot longer. And I won't go through all eight, but your listeners, your viewers may have heard of some of these telomere shortening, mitochondrial dysfunction, senescent or zombie cells accumulating in the body.

But what I've always been fascinated with is whether there's a single unified reason we age, not just having eight tributaries or rivers, but is there a major upstream river that if we block that, all of these other things don't occur? Or if we cause that to happen quickly, do these other hallmarks happen more quickly? And I propose what's called the information theory of aging. And that is that we lose what's called epigenetic information. And that leads to all of these other hallmarks of aging. And if we can slow that down or speed it up, then the other hallmarks should either slow down or get speeded up as well. And that's what we're finding in my lab. And as I described in my book.