Top 20 David Andrew Sinclair Quotes

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

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.

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

Scientists don’t like to be called salesmen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was criticized for saying that Pfizer doesn’t know how to make a molecule right.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.