David Sabatini, M.D., Ph.D.: rapamycin and the discovery of mTOR — the nexus of aging and longevity?

**Peter Attia, MD** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
In this podcast, I'll be speaking with my close friend and amazing scientist, David Sabatini. David's a professor of biology and a member of the Whitehead Institute at MIT. He's also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a senior member of the Broad Institute, along with a bunch of other accolades that would take too long to get into here.
This podcast was actually recorded initially as part of an interview series I was doing for research around my book. And this was recorded in August of 2017 Maybe at some point, we'll even just put the video up as this was actually done as a video interview with David, along with a number of his amazing post-docs. And certainly some of those will probably make their way into the podcast as well. Now, in this episode, we talk about his amazing journey in science and the work and stuff that he's done around mTOR and rapamycin. And if you've been following the blog and or paying attention to stuff that I'm interested in, you'll know that mTOR and rapamycin sit kind of at the heart of it. Now, about four years ago, David and I were having lunch one day and it was kind of the first time that he ever really told me the full story of his work as a graduate student at Hopkins, where he was part of the MD PhD program. And I was just, you know, I remember sitting there taking notes on a napkin and thinking, God, this is such an incredible story of science. And I remember thinking, God, you know, one day we have to have this discussion again, but such that most people can actually hear it besides just me. So part of what we discuss on this podcast is actually that journey and how as a young PhD newbie grad student, David methodically went after a problem that really wasn't even deemed particularly interesting at the time, which was to basically figure out how this thing called rapamycin actually worked. And of course, through the process, ended up being the first person to identify this mechanistic target of rapamycin in mammalian cells.
Now, stuff that I found really interesting in this podcast is that David points out that he's, from an academic standpoint, kind of an unusual bird in that he's one of the few people who has carried his work from graduate school into his career. And that's actually pretty unusual. He's incredibly thoughtful. And some of you may have already heard a podcast that David, myself and Nav Chandel, another good friend who will also be on the podcast, recorded back with Tim Ferriss on Easter Island back in the fall of 2016 We'll link to that here as well. And obviously the reason we went to Easter Island was as sort of a pilgrimage based on the discovery of the bacteria that ultimately led to rapamycin, a bacteria by the name of Streptomyces hydrocofficus.
The interest I have in mTOR, of course, has to do with its central role in nutrient sensing. And of course, it's, I believe, and many believe its central role in longevity. So if you are interested in longevity, if you're interested in fasting, if you're interested in rapamycin, you're really gonna wanna listen to this podcast because David is effectively mTOR man. I don't think there really is a person on the planet, and I'm saying that without trying to be hyperbolic, but I don't think there's anybody on the planet who knows more about rapamycin and mTOR than David Sabatini. And if you like this podcast, please make sure to check out the one that's going to be out soon with Matt Caberlin, which will take this discussion to another level as well, looking at Matt's work in docs. So without further delay, here's my discussion and conversation with David Sabatini. David, thank you so much for making time to sit down today and talk about what is potentially mutually our favorite topic of discussion. Before we jump into it though, maybe for people who don't know you, can you tell us a little bit about how you got here and what it is you do specifically?