David A. Sinclair > Quotes

“Aging, quite simply, is a loss of information.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“There isn’t much debate on the downsides of consumption of animal protein. Study after study has demonstrated that heavily animal-based diets are associated with high cardiovascular mortality and cancer risk.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“Thanks to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and the abundance of sugars and carbohydrates on every supermarket shelf around the globe, high blood sugar is causing the premature deaths of 3.8 million people a year.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“Because as it turns out, exposing your body to less-than-comfortable temperatures is another very effective way to turn on your longevity genes.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“I believe that aging is a disease. I believe it is treatable. I believe we can treat it within our lifetimes. And in doing so, I believe, everything we know about human health will be fundamentally changed.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“Why would we choose to focus on problems that impact small groups of people if we could address the problem that impacts everyone—especially if, in doing so, we could significantly impact all those other, smaller problems?”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“In my mind, there are few sins so egregious as extending life without health. This is important. It does not matter if we can extend lifespans if we cannot extend healthspans to an equal extent. And so if we’re going to do the former, we have an absolute moral obligation to do the latter.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” R. P. Feynman,”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“Youth → broken DNA → genome instability → disruption of DNA packaging and gene regulation (the epigenome) → loss of cell identity → cellular senescence → disease → death.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“The longevity genes I work on are called “sirtuins,” named after the yeast SIR2 gene, the first one to be discovered. There are seven sirtuins in mammals, SIRT1 to SIRT7, and they are made by almost every cell in the body. When I started my research, sirtuins were barely on the scientific radar. Now this family of genes is at the forefront of medical research and drug development. Descended from gene B in M. superstes, sirtuins are enzymes that remove acetyl tags from histones and other proteins and, by doing so, change the packaging of the DNA, turning genes off and on when needed. These critical epigenetic regulators sit at the very top of cellular control systems, controlling our reproduction and our DNA repair. After a few billion years of advancement since the days of yeast, they have evolved to control our health, our fitness, and our very survival. They have also evolved to require a molecule called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD. As we will see later, the loss of NAD as we age, and the resulting decline in sirtuin activity, is thought to be a primary reason our bodies develop diseases when we are old but not when we are young.”
― David Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“As a species, we are living much longer than ever. But not much better. Not at all. Over the past century we have gained additional years, but not additional life—not life worth living anyway.5”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“As cloning beautifully proves, our cells retain their youthful digital information even when we are old. To become young again, we just need to find some polish to remove the scratches.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“I take 1 gram (1,000 mg) of NMN every morning, along with 1 gram of resveratrol (shaken into my homemade yogurt) and 1 gram of metformin.7 • I take a daily dose of vitamin D, vitamin K2, and 83 mg of aspirin. • I strive to keep my sugar, bread, and pasta intake as low as possible. I gave up desserts at age 40, though I do steal tastes. • I try to skip one meal a day or at least make it really small. My busy schedule almost always means that I miss lunch most days of the week. • Every few months, a phlebotomist comes to my home to draw my blood, which I have analyzed for dozens of biomarkers. When my levels of various markers are not optimal, I moderate them with food or exercise. • I try to take a lot of steps each day and walk upstairs, and I go to the gym most weekends with my son, Ben; we lift weights, jog a bit, and hang out in the sauna before dunking in an ice-cold pool. • I eat a lot of plants and try to avoid eating other mammals, even though they do taste good. If I work out, I will eat meat. • I don’t smoke. I try to avoid microwaved plastic, excessive UV exposure, X-rays, and CT scans. • I try to stay on the cool side during the day and when I sleep at night. • I aim to keep my body weight or BMI in the optimal range for healthspan, which for me is 23 to 25.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“Indeed, we know more about the health of our cars than we know about our own health. That’s farcical. And it’s about to change.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. More simply known as the Royal Society, the world’s oldest national scientific organization was established in 1660 to promote and disseminate “new science” by big thinkers of the day such as Sir Francis Bacon, the Enlightenment’s promulgator of “the prolongation of life.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“Don’t be disheartened by my claim that we are the biological equivalent of an old DVD player. This is actually good news. If Szilard had turned out to be right about mutations causing aging, we would not be able to easily address it, because when information is lost without a backup, it is lost for good. Ask anyone who’s tried to play or restore content from a DVD that’s had an edge broken off: what is gone is gone. But we can usually recover information from a scratched DVD. And if I am right, the same kind of process is what it will take to reverse aging.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“We’d die quite quickly without amino acids, the organic compounds that serve as the building blocks for every protein in the human body. Without them—and in particular the nine essential amino acids that our bodies cannot make on their own—our cells can’t assemble the life-giving enzymes needed for life.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“It needs to be pointed out that very few of the global carrying capacity models account for human ingenuity. As we have discussed, it is easier not to see things coming than to see them, so we tend to extrapolate into the future directly from the way things are now. That’s unfortunate and, in my view, scientifically wrong, for it eliminates an important factor from the equation.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“Your generation, just like all the ones that came before, didn’t do anything about the destruction that is being done to this planet,” Alex told me that evening. “And now you want to help people live longer? So they can do even more damage to the world?”
I went to bed that night troubled. Not by our firstborn’s denouncement of me; of that, I admit, I was a little proud. We’ll never destroy the global patriarchy if our children don’t first practice on their fathers.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To

“a few years ago, researchers noticed a curious phenomenon: people taking metformin were living notably healthier lives—independent, it seemed, of its effect on diabetes.16 In”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“I take 1 gram (1,000 mg) of NMN every morning, along with 1 gram of resveratrol (shaken into my homemade yogurt) and 1 gram of metformin.7 • I take a daily dose of vitamin D, vitamin K2, and 83 mg of aspirin.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“THE THREE MAIN LONGEVITY PATHWAYS, mTOR, AMPK, AND SIRTUINS, EVOLVED TO PROTECT THE BODY DURING TIMES OF ADVERSITY BY ACTIVATING SURVIVAL MECHANISMS. When they are activated, either by low-calorie or low-amino-acid diets, or by exercise, organisms become healthier, disease resistant, and longer lived. Molecules that tweak these pathways, such as rapamycin, metformin, resveratrol, and NAD boosters, can mimic the benefits of low-calorie diets and exercise and extend the lifespan of diverse organisms.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“DELETING THE ZOMBIE SENESCENT CELLS IN OLD TISSUES. Thanks to the primordial survival circuit we’ve inherited from our ancestors, our cells eventually lose their identities and cease to divide, in some cases sitting in our tissues for decades. Zombie cells secrete factors that accelerate cancer, inflammation, and help turn other cells into zombies. Senescent cells are hard to reverse aging in, so the best thing to do is to kill them off. Drugs called senolytics are in development to do just that, and they could rapidly rejuvenate us.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“but after thousands of studies, the evidence is irrefutable: if you believe climate change is a threat, you can’t say that GMOs are, because the evidence that GMOs are safe is stronger than the evidence that climate change is occurring.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“Every one of our cells has the same DNA, of course, so what differentiates a nerve cell from a skin cell is the epigenome, the collective term for the control systems and cellular structures that tell the cell which genes should be turned on and which should remain off. And this, far more than our genes, is what actually controls much of our lives.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“the Royal Society. Founded in the 1600s during the Age of Enlightenment and formerly headed by Australia’s catalyst, the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, as well as such legendary minds as Sir Isaac Newton and Thomas Henry Huxley, the society’s cheeky motto is a pretty good one to live by: “Nullius in Verba,” it says underneath the society’s coat of arms. That’s Latin for “Take nobody’s word for it.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“Like rapamycin, metformin mimics aspects of calorie restriction. But instead of inhibiting TOR, it limits the metabolic reactions in mitochondria, slowing down the process by which our cellular powerhouses convert macronutrients into energy.20 The result is the activation of AMPK, an enzyme known for its ability to respond to low energy levels and restore the function of mitochondria. It also activates SIRT1, one of my lab’s favorite proteins. Among other beneficial effects, metformin inhibits cancer cell metabolism, increases mitochondrial activity, and removes misfolded proteins.21”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“The way doctors treat illness today “is simple,” wrote S. Jay Olshansky, a demographer at the University of Illinois. “As soon as a disease appears, attack that disease as if nothing else is present; beat the disease down, and once you succeed, push the patient out the door until he or she faces the next challenge; then beat that one down. Repeat until failure.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“The other test of age is the sitting-rising test (SRT). Sit on the floor, barefooted, with legs crossed. Lean forward quickly and see if you can get up in one move. A young person can. A middle-aged person typically needs to push off with one of their hands. An elderly person often needs to get onto one knee. A study of people 51 to 80 years found that 157 out of 159 people who passed away in 75 months had received less than perfect SRT scores.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“The problem is not just population, it’s consumption. And it’s not just consumption, it’s waste. In comes the food; out goes the effluent. In come the fossil fuels; out go the carbon emissions. In come the petrochemicals; out goes the plastic. On average, Americans consume more than three times the amount of food they need to survive and about 250 times as much water.14 In return, they produce 4.4 pounds of trash each day, recycling or composting only about of a third of it.15 Thanks to things such as cars, planes, big homes, and power-hungry clothes dryers,16 the annual carbon dioxide emissions of an average American are five times as high as the global average. Even the “floor”—below which even monks living in American monasteries typically do not go—is twice the global average.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To