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.
David Andrew Sinclair
Unfortunately, because aging is so common and natural, we tend to think of it as destiny or something we should accept.
As we get better at reversing aging it will be possible to take one medicine and within weeks feel and even look younger. Imagine going to a doctor to get a pill for diabetes, and this same medicine will prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, and will give you more vitality too.
The way to make a worm live longer is probably quite different from making a human live longer.
I tried calorie restriction and couldn't do it. It's really hard to be hungry all the time.
The ultimate goal is to have a pill that can prevent or reverse all diseases of aging. The major diseases that I'd like to tackle are heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and cancer. I want to reduce those diseases by 10 percent.
A lot of scientists are hesitant to get involved with industry. It's seen as, you know, getting in bed with the devil, actually. But I found that doing this has been really the only way and one of the best ways I know to take a finding from the bench side to people.
If I'm not hungry and I'm busy, I am quite happy to skip a meal. It's informal intermittent fasting. I feel strongly that this is one of the strongest areas of longevity research.
I actually think it will be possible one day to be immortal.
I'm driven to get to goals as fast as possible. It frustrates people in my lab who have something they think is cool, but if it doesn't move us forward, I don't want to do it.
I believe in my work and advocate for my conclusions.
Scientists don't like to be called salesmen.
My grandmother is the black-sheep rebel of the family.
Resveratrol does not act primarily as an antioxidant. It is far more interesting and powerful than that. Resveratrol turns on our body's genetic defenses against diseases and aging itself.
We can change our lives for the better, and always have. We used to think pain during surgery and dying during childbirth were inevitable. We no longer accept that, and we shouldn't just accept aging.
I thought that tackling aging and the mechanisms that promote life would be worth figuring out. I wanted to learn why it is that some people are healthier than others and why some people live to 110 and others only to 60 or 70.
So aging is really just the way we deteriorate over time. Lifespan on the other hand is how long we live. We typically refer to that as longevity.
You want to shock the body and not be constant. Intermittent fasting is an increasingly popular way: Skip breakfast, for example. Also lifting weights, losing your breath from exercise and alternating between hot and cold temperatures. We think these measures will only get us to 100 to 122 years old. That's our natural lifespan.
Aging is just like any deterioration of the body. It fulfills every category of what we call a disease except one: it impacts more than half the population.
The mice that had the resveratrol in their diet were still obese, but they were seemingly or relatively immune to the effects of the obesity. So their arteries were clear, their liver was nice and thin. Their bones were stronger. They could run further.
Well, we can study aging in people, but of course those studies take decades. So what we try to do is we use simpler organisms to try and understand the basic mechanisms and so in my laboratory, for example, we use things like simple baker's yeast that we use to make bread.
When I started in the field, aging research was the backwater of biology. The idea that you could find a molecule that would prevent many diseases at once was considered impossible.
I was criticized for saying that Pfizer doesn't know how to make a molecule right.
We used to think that aging was a lot like, as if we were cars made fresh and youthful and then we've entered this breakdown in diet. What we didn't realize until recently is that we're much more complex than a car. We fix ourselves if we're broken.
Well, originally we found resveratrol just in a test tube, looking for molecules that would turn on this enzyme, this protein that seems to defend against diseases in aging.
So what we're all hoping to do, us researchers, is to develop ways to not really just extend lifespan but to keep people healthier for longer. We may just have a greater impact than a single drug because these drugs could potentially treat one disease but prevent 20 others.
We once thought of cancer as an incurable disease; then we started treating it.
Doctors will prescribe medicines for a particular disease but, as a side effect, those medications will work to prevent dozens of others.
It's been known since 1916 that cutting back calories is beneficial in every organism it's been tested on - from yeast to worms to mice to monkeys. I think it would be a surprise if we are an exception to that rule.
We've always known that our bodies are capable of healing themselves under the right conditions: Diet and exercise improve our health. But there are also ancient genetic survival pathways in every living thing.
Resveratrol had a decent benefit when the mice were obese and sedentary. The mice that were fed a lean diet and resveratrol lived significantly longer than other treated mice as well as those that had no healthy diet and no resveratrol. So resveratrol is not an excuse to be lazy or eat whatever you want.
