On the morning I spoke with Professor David Sinclair AO, Cyclone Alfred was moving with seeming inexorability towards me in Brisbane, while Sinclair, in the US, lamented that he was still cleaning up contamination in his Los Angeles house after the wildfires of January.
Climate change, eh? But here’s the good news: if humanity can survive its challenges, we can look forward to greatly increased lifespans, thanks to the research of Sinclair and others like him.
A Harvard genetics professor and one of the hot-ticket speakers at the World Science Festival in Brisbane this month, Sinclair believes we are living at a turning point in medical history, analogous to the invention of antibiotics and vaccines.
The first person to live to 150, he believes, has already been born.
“It’s not a question of how long do you want to live. It’s more about how healthy do you want to stay?” Professor David Sinclair is professor of genetics and founder of Harvard Medical School’s Paul F Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research.
“Think of it this way,” he says, in an Aussie accent gene-spliced with East Coast American. “A person born 100 years ago had a 2 per cent chance of reaching 100. A child born today has a 50 per cent chance of reaching 100. That’s without any major advance in technology – it’s just standard medicine.
“So if half of the people make it to 100, there’s a reasonable chance that somebody could make it to 150 with technologies that are in the future.”
Except, that technology might already be here.
Boston-based Sinclair was the founding director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School for 18 years, and is one of the leading world authorities on the scientific causes of ageing.
In 2020, his team used gene therapy to reverse age-related vision loss in mice. “We’re looking at human clinical trials beginning as early as next year,” he says.
“We’re not only interested in the eye, it’s just a good place to start with this technology. Eventually we want to advance it to the point where we can reset different tissues – kidney, liver, and eventually the whole body of animals, and then people.
“I believe we now have a solid understanding of what’s causing ageing, and even how to prevent and reverse the process.”
The problem, and Sinclair’s widely believed hypothesis, is called the Information Theory of Ageing. It holds that with time, cells lose the ability to “remember” their identity and function, like the accumulation of scratches on a CD.
The theory suggests that restoring lost information through epigenetic reprogramming could potentially reverse the ageing process, “like a software reset”. Restoring the coenzyme NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), which declines in cells with time, can help cells recall their function, and protect the body from the diseases associated with getting old, such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Sinclair’s lab has five trials in progress using NAD boosters; the ultimate aim is to create an anti-ageing drug.
Another idea of his is “adversity mimesis”. Tricking the body into thinking it’s under various kinds of stress stimulates enzymes known as sirtuins to be more active, which is good for the epigenome. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger – and more long-lived.
“Fasting is a way to simulate adversity. These days, very few of us will literally run out of food, but we can make the body think that’s a possibility by eating less often, and that does raise NAD levels.”
Cold exposure, exercising with the right intensity, and eating less meat are other ways of putting the body into a defensive mode and preventing cell senescence.
Sinclair is 55, but that’s just his chronological age. His biological age is no more than 45. This is according to Inside Tracker, a biometric data company that analyses blood and DNA to give clients a personalised understanding of their own bodies – Sinclair is the chair of their scientific advisory board. He also looks remarkably boyish for someone born before the first moon landing.
“You might expect that because that’s what I do for a living. Small changes can make a big difference: don’t eat too much, eat less often, make sure you exercise. There’s a couple of supplements that I continue to take, as does my father.”
Stayin’ alive: David Sinclair is speaking in Brisbane at the World Science Festival 2025. Credit: Louie Douvis
Sinclair got his PhD in molecular genetics from UNSW in 1995. That same year he became the first non-American to win a fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, which allowed him to do a post-doctorate with Dr Leonard Guarente at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying the genetic causes of ageing in yeast.
“Those four years were just incredibly exciting and productive. We were putting out papers in top journals every few months.“
The Garvan Institute in Sydney had a position waiting for him on his planned return. “But when you get a job offer at Harvard, it’s really hard to say no.”
Sinclair has published more than 200 papers and been cited more than 85,000 times. He holds more than 60 patents, and has co-founded a dozen successful pharmaceutical companies, including MetroBiotech, EdenRoc Sciences, Tally Health, and Life Biosciences (which spearheads his cellular rejuvenation research).
Lifespan: Why We Age – And Why We Don’t Have To, his 2019 book written with journalist Matthew LaPlante, is a New York Times bestseller, and its podcast version peaked at number one for Health & Fitness shows on Apple Podcasts.
If you want to gauge the interest Sinclair’s work has excited, you only have to look at the competition.
“Our competitors are Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner with Altos Labs with, I think, $3 billion plus, the biggest series A investment in biotech ever. Sam Altman from OpenAI is also competing against us with his company, Retro Biosciences.
So it’s high-stakes. It’s similar to the AI field.
“With longevity, it’s gone from the backwater of biology when I first started, to one of the most exciting areas of human endeavour.”
Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Sam Altman (OpenAI) have both invested in research into life extension: Altman $US180m, Bezos in the order of $3b.Credit: AP/Bloomberg
When I told my wife about Sinclair’s work, her response was telling: “Oh, is that so tech bros can live forever?”
“Forever” might not be the exaggeration it sounds like. As Sinclair says on his podcast, the longer you live, the longer you will live. “Right now, if we live an extra year, we get an extra three months of life, because these technologies are going so fast. And soon we’ll have another six months, another year. And that’s when things get super interesting.”
And, in our emerging tech oligarchy, a tad disturbing. Antonio Regalado wrote in MIT Technology Review in 2023 that “For age reversal, if it ever works, one often cited risk is public resentment, especially if it’s going to be made available to rich people like Altman first.”
Sinclair, however, insists he’s about bringing actionable information to everyone, not just billionaires. He assures me he is not obsessed with his own mortality. “Anyone who’s seen me drive a car knows that I’m not so interested in self-preservation. I like to be a role model, and that’s why I live the way I do.
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“People mistake my work for just making people live longer. I don’t know how to make any animal live longer unless they’re healthier. So, really, the goal is to prevent and treat diseases that kill us, similar to every other pursuit in medicine.
“The only difference is that here we’re tackling the root cause rather than the symptoms of ageing.
“And while that might sound scary, at the core, it’s no different than what we’ve been working on for the last 1000 years to improve the human condition, and prevent suffering.”
Professor David Sinclair appears in conversation with Natasha Mitchell at the Concert Hall, QPAC, Brisbane, on Saturday, March 29, 11.30am.
World Science Festival runs March 21-30.
