David A. Sinclair Quotes

“I actually think it will be possible one day to be immortal.”

“Scientists don't like to be called salesmen.”

“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.”

“Aging, quite simply, is a loss of information.”

“And that’s the world’s biggest problem: the future is seen as someone else’s concern.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Doctors will prescribe medicines for a particular disease but, as a side effect, those medications will work to prevent dozens of others.”

“Exposing your body to less-than-comfortable temperatures is another very effective way to turn on your longevity genes.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Only 20 percent of our longevity is genetically determined. The rest is what we do, how we live our lives and increasingly the molecules that we take. It's not the loss of our DNA that causes aging, it's the problems in reading the information, the epigenetic noise.”

“Separating aging from disease obfuscates a truth about how we reach the ends of our lives: though it’s certainly important to know why someone fell from a cliff, it’s equally important to know what brought that person to the precipice in the first place. Aging brings us to the precipice. Give any of us 100 years or so, and it brings us all there.”

“Simply keeping people alive — decades after their lives have become defined by pain, disease, frailty, and immobility — is no virtue.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The tastiest strawberries have been stressed by periods of limited water intake.”

“The way to make a worm live longer is probably quite different from making a human live longer.”

“There are plenty of stressors that will activate longevity genes without damaging the cell, including certain types of exercise, intermittent fasting, low-protein diets, and exposure to hot and cold temperatures.”

“There is nothing more dangerous to us than age. Yet we have conceded its power over us. And we have turned our fight for better health in other directions.”

“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.”

“Though smoking increases the risk of getting cancer fivefold, being 50 years old increases your cancer risk a hundredfold.”

“Unfortunately, because aging is so common and natural, we tend to think of it as destiny or something we should accept.”

“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.”

“We once thought of cancer as an incurable disease; then we started treating it.”

“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?”

“Youth → broken DNA → genome instability → disruption of DNA packaging and gene regulation (the epigenome) → loss of cell identity → cellular senescence → disease → death.”