Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

by David A. Sinclair

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.

If there were anything like a “natural” limit, Ellis has argued, the human population probably exceeded it tens of thousands of years ago, when our hunter-gatherer ancestors began to rely upon increasingly sophisticated water control systems and agricultural technologies to sustain and grow their numbers. From that point on, our species has grown only by the combined grace of the natural world and our ability to adapt to it technologically.

Technology reliance

Water delivery systems are not natural. Agriculture is not natural. Electricity is not natural. Schools and hospitals and roads and clothes are not natural. We have long since crossed all of those figurative and literal bridges.

Wow

the only thing that seems unnatural—in that it has never happened in the history of our species—is to accept limitations on what we can and cannot do to improve our lives.

If we were to stop all deaths—every single one around the globe—right now, we would add about 150,000 people to our planet each day. That would be 55 million people each year. That might sound like a lot, but it would be less than a single percentage point. At that rate, we would add a billion people to our ranks every eighteen years, which is still considerably slower than the rate at which the last few billion people have come along and easily countered by the global decline in family sizes.

One hundred years is a reasonable expectation for most people alive today. One hundred twenty is our known potential and one that many people could reach—again, in good health if technologies in development come to fruition. If epigenetic reprogramming reaches its potential or someone comes up with another way to convince cells to be young again, 150 might even be possible for someone living on this planet with us right now. And ultimately there is no upward biological limit, no law that says we must die at a certain age.

Age limit

As yet, there is really no evidence in modern times that population levels correlate with, let alone cause, increases in human misery. Much to the contrary, in fact, our world is more populated today than it ever has been—and it’s a better place for more people, too.

Every now and then there will be a reverse. Depends what generation it is.

Steven Pinker put it this way in his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress: “Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy.”

betterment?

The subsequent Education Revolution, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led to rates of literacy that grew to meet the availability of information. Elders were no longer the only sources of long-held information. Rather than being seen as an essential asset to a functioning society, the elderly came to be viewed as a burden.

Elder as a burden

A lot of people worry that young workers will be “crowded out” of jobs if no one ever retires. I don’t. Countries stagnate because they don’t innovate and don’t utilize their human capital, not because there aren’t enough jobs. This explains why countries with an earlier retirement age have a lower GDP.

Wow

The foreboding article concludes, “While we are fast running out of use for people, we are at the same time ironically producing people faster than ever.” Those fears never materialized as fact, not even in the face of another tremendous disruption of the status quo. In 1950, the US labor force participation rate of women was about 33 percent; by the turn of the century, it had nearly doubled. Tens of millions of women began working during those decades; that didn’t result in tens of millions of men losing their jobs.

many Americans plan to work beyond the traditional age of retirement, at least on a part-time basis, not always because they have to but often because they want to.

Should people work less? Or work differently?

The best way to create jobs for productive people of any age, even less skilled workers, is to build and attract companies that hire highly skilled ones. If you want a country in which your citizens flourish and that others envy, don’t reduce the retirement age or discourage medical treatments for the elderly, hoping to save money and make room for the young. Instead, keep your population healthy and productive, and destroy all barriers to education and innovation.

Main. Productivity

When Goldman reviewed the data, something became clear: reducing the burden of any one disease, even several, wouldn’t change much. “Making progress against one disease means that another will eventually emerge in its place,” his team reported in Perspectives in Medicine. “However, evidence suggests that if aging is delayed, all fatal and disabling disease risks would be lowered simultaneously.”

Interesting

Seneca the philosopher was begging his followers to stop and smell the roses. “Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future,” he wrote.

Seneca

IN 1908, ONLY FIVE YEARS AFTER THE WRIGHT BROTHERS BEGAN FLYING, H. G. Wells published a book titled A War in the Air, in which Germany starts an air war against Great Britain, France, and the United States.

Arthur C. Clarke increasingly regarded predicting the future a “discouraging, hazardous occupation.” That may be true, but Clarke was awfully good at it, anticipating satellites, home computers, email, the internet, Google, live-streaming TV, Skype, and smart watches.

Arthur C. Clarke

The evidence of the effectiveness of AMPK activators, TOR inhibitors, and sirtuin activators is deep and wide. On top of what we already know about metformin, NAD boosters, rapalogs, and senolytics, every day the odds increase that even more effective molecule or gene therapy will be discovered, as brilliant researchers around the world join the global fight to treat aging, the mother of all diseases.

Main

To put it into even greater perspective, though, consider this: US consumers spend more than $300 billion per year on coffee.10 To be fair, life without coffee might not be worth living. But if you are a researcher who wants to make life even better—by slowing or reversing diseases of aging—you have a bit of a problem. There just isn’t that much public money being spent on that area of science.

Public spending on science

Fortunately, the science of longevity shows that the longer we make rodents live, the faster they tend to die. They still die of the same diseases, but, perhaps because they are very old, and the animals are on the brink anyway, they tend to suffer for days rather than months, then keel over.

when I do this little survey and then tell the audience that they could retain their health no matter how many years they live, the numbers of those who say they’d like to live forever shoots way up. Almost everyone wants that. It turns out that most people aren’t afraid of losing their lives; they are afraid of losing their humanity.

The problem isn’t population; it is consumption.

The World Health Organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Medical Association have also affirmed that, as WHO puts it, “no effects on human health have been shown as a result of the consumption of such foods by the general population.”

GMO food.

the Wharton School. “There needs to be institutions to instill a sense of the coming strife of the business life and of the immense swings upward or downward that await the incompetent soldier in this modern strife.”

Among those changes was something that had never existed in the history of labor: the weekend. We tend to take the five-day workweek as a given, but it’s an exceptionally recent innovation. It didn’t exist as a concept—or even a phrase—until the late 1800s.

Weekends. 1800s

Spend a day in a nursing home like my wife does every few days. Go feed people who can’t chew. Wipe their bottoms. Bathe them with a sponge. Watch as they struggle to remember where they are and who they are. When you are done, I think you will agree that it would be negligent and cruel for you not to do what you can to combat your own age-related deterioration.

On June 18, 2018, WHO released the eleventh edition of the International Classification of Diseases, known as ICD-11. It is a fairly unremarkable document, except that someone slipped in a new disease code. At first no one saw it. Here is the line, which you can find on the WHO website6 if you type in code MG2A. It reads: MG2A Old age old age without mention of psychosis senescence without mention of psychosis senile debility

ICD-11

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.

Routine

Supplements are far, far less regulated than medicines, so if I do take a supplement, I look for a large manufacturer with a good reputation, seek highly pure molecules (more than 98 percent is a good guide), and look for “GMP” on the label, which means the product was made under “good manufacturing practices.”

GMP (good manufacturing practices) on supplement

Nicotinamide riboside, or NR, is converted to NMN, so some people take NR instead of NMN because it is cheaper. Cheaper still are niacin and nicotinamide, but they don’t seem to raise NAD levels as NMN and NR do.

NR or NMN.