Dr. David Sinclair

It removes these structures to try and adapt to the stress.

The label.

The label comes off in a desperate attempt to survive, but then the cell doesn't fully revert back to the original state.

Some of these chemicals and some of the proteins that bind to the DNA, which is also important for this epigenome, they don't all go back to where they started.

I've used the analogy that it's like a ping pong or a tennis match where the proteins that control the genes, they get relocalized to where the emergency is.

And an emergency, the one that we think is most dangerous and a large cause of aging is a broken chromosome.

If you have a broken chromosome, if you don't fix that, you're either going to become a cancer cell or you're going to die.

It's not good.

And so cells panic.

And in that panic of moving proteins away and turning on these stress response genes, that's great in the short term.

The cell might survive, but they don't fully reset.

Those proteins don't all go back to where they once were, say, 10 minutes ago when the stress needed to be, the disaster happened.

And if you do that time and time again, and every one of your cells has at least one broken chromosome every day, that's 20 trillion of these events every day in your body.

Over time, tick, tick, tick, you get the aging process, we believe.

Well, before I get into that, one of the reasons we know that this works, because you asked me, how do we know that's true, is that...

We created this catastrophe in animals.

We took mice and we broke their chromosomes in a way that didn't cause cancer or mutations.

If we're right, what should happen to these mice?

They get old fast.

Grey hair.