💡 The new science of aging

Harvard geneticist, David Sinclair, was a guest on the most recent episode of my Exponential View podcast. David is the author of Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To. His research focuses mostly on anti-ageing research, and takes a novel approach – what if we treated ageing like any other disease? We also talked about developing novel drugs, taking criticism seriously and approaching concepts such as ‘quality of life’ differently. 

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.

You've identified a number of pathways that if they can be maintained in a healthy and functional level, they can tackle the hallmarks of aging and that which lead to the diseases of aging. A key part of this is recovery and other parts of it is hormesis, which is a little bit of strain, a little bit of fasting, a little less animal products. If we start to make those parts of our lifestyle into regimes, what do you think it does to our length of our lives? Our longevity, but also our vitality?

David Sinclair: "It's really important when we think about old age that we don't look at our grandparents because that's not using today's knowledge. We have the ability, and certainly if you look at examples of people who've lived the right way, eaten well, not overeaten, maybe skipped a meal every day or two. These people live a super healthy, vibrant life into their eighties, and nineties, and sometimes beyond that. What I want is to bring the average person up to that. We have the knowledge. In fact, 80% of our longevity and health in old age is up to the epigenome and only about 20% is genetic. And so that's really important to realize that our health in old age is vibrancy, but you have to do that in your middle age and live the right way."

What are the criticisms of the Information Theory of Aging that you take seriously?

David Sinclair: “I'm sure some scientists are thinking that the Information Theory is wrong. That's fine. All science ends up being wrong in the end anyway – ask Isaac Newton. I just want us to have an open discussion and be free to put forward new ideas. One of the criticisms is that if the information theory is true, then we should be able to find a backup of that information. So, we've been looking for the last few years to find whether you could reset the system. Now, if you think the genome and the mutations that occur, which is the old theory of aging, if that were true, it shouldn't be possible to reverse aging because those mutations can't easily fix its set. But I'm arguing that we've cloned animals from adult cells. So it's probably true that you can reset the epigenome and get a brand new cell or even a whole new organism."

Is there a danger that the types of interventions and technologies that might arise from your research will allow us to enrich some lives, for long enough that by the time that it's become widely available, there are inequalities deeply, deeply baked in?

David Sinclair: “That's the conundrum with every technology. Drugs cost a lot of money. We're forced to spend upwards of a billion dollars, at least $500 million to make them. So, that's the system that we're in. Now, these drugs that I'm helping to develop, some of them are expensive. So, the gene therapy to reverse blindness will be expensive. Gene therapies right now are very difficult to make. But others such as the NAD-boosting molecules may be a couple of dollars, may be $10 to make. So, for a week's treatment, this is not going to be out the range of the national healthcare systems. So, I'm hopeful that these drugs that I'm developing will be made freely or accessible to the world.”