What would you do if you could live not just years, but decades longer? What if you didn’t have to worry that the clock was ticking? And what if you were told that very soon, you won’t?
We are at the brink of major advances that could dramatically expand our energy, healthspan, and lifespan. The science is around the corner—and in many cases, it’s a practical reality. For the first time in human history, scientists are cracking the code to understand why we age, and what can be done about it.
One of the scientists on the frontlines of human longevity is David Sinclair, Ph.D., a tenured professor at Harvard Medical School, founder of nearly a dozen biotech startups, chairman of Life Biosciences, and one of Time magazine’s list of 100 Most Influential People in the world.
Sinclair is a contrarian, disruptor, and a truly original thinker. At 53-years old, he looks and feels 20 years younger—the result of a small handful of vitality supplements and simple medications he’s taken over the last five years. Sinclair’s very own “rejuvenation recipe” has the potential to be extremely powerful, and is a byproduct of his groundbreaking theory on aging—one that not only opens the possibility of slowing aging but also reversing it.
David Sinclair’s Information Theory of Aging
Contrary to popular science, Sinclair’s theory of aging centers around the belief that most chronic or degenerative diseases—the ones that hijack our energy and degrade our health—aren’t hardwired into our genes. In reality, they’re the result of bad “information” that makes our genes turn “on” or “off” at the wrong times or in the wrong places in the body. It’s like corrupted code on a computer hard drive, only on a molecular level.
So what is responsible for the “bad information”—the breakdown of cellular communication and regulation in our bodies? The answer is our Genome, Epigenome, and Sirtuins.
The Building Blocks of Aging: Genome, Epigenome, and Sirtuins
Every cell in your body has an identical instruction set of 3.2 billion letters from your mother and 3.2 billion letters from your father. These letters make up your DNA and are known as your genome, which codes for 30,000 proteins, the enzymes that create life. Quite astonishingly, the proteins your genome codes for at birth are the very same they code for when you are 80 years old!
So if your genome doesn’t change throughout your lifetime, then why don’t you look the same at 80 years old as you did when you were 20? That’s where your epigenome comes in. Your epigenome is the cellular software that controls your DNA, your genome, telling each cell what genes it should turn on and what genes it should turn off.
Here’s what this means: The epigenome, which controls gene expression, is the main mechanism that decides if you will suffer incurable diseases and disorders, like diabetes, Parkinson’s, or macular degeneration. You might find it surprising that only 20% of our health in old age and our lifespan is genetically determined, and the epigenome accounts for the other 80%. In other words, despite what most people have been conditioned to believe, your genes are not your destiny.
Errors in our epigenome accumulate over our life. As we age, our cellular DNA is constantly challenged by damage-inducing factors such as smoke, radiation, and toxins in the environment. This is where our third ingredient of why we age, sirtuins, plays a critical role.
Sirtuins are a set of seven regulatory genes that have two different and competing functions in your cells. First, they govern the epigenome—turning the right genes on at the right time and in the right cell, boosting mitochondrial activity, reducing inflammation, and protecting telomeres. And second, they play a critical role in DNA repair. As we age, the need for DNA repair increases because of accumulated damage.
As such, our sirtuins become overtaxed, get spread too thin, and get distracted from their critical job of regulating the epigenome. The result? As we age and accumulate more and more DNA damage, our ability to repair the damage at the same time becomes increasingly challenging. From entire organ systems down to individual cells, our bodies become dysregulated, and epigenetic noise accumulates.
So if supercharging our sirtuins is the real fountain of youth, how do we go about reviving them? The answer is evidenced in an experiment Sinclair conducted at Harvard, and a Nobel Prize-winning discovery by Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka, that will change the course of medicine. Read more about their astonishing discoveries, and the “epigenetic time machine” that followed, in Life Force.
