Dr. David Sinclair

One is we want to slow aging down so we don't get those diseases.

And when they do occur, don't just stick a Band-Aid on, reverse the age of the body, and then the diseases will go away.

Fortunately, during the 2000s, we settled on eight or nine major causes of aging.

These eight or nine causes, at least for the first time, allowed us to come around and talk together.

We put them on a pizza, so everyone got equal slices.

But I think that there's one slice of the pizza that is way larger than the others.

And we can get to that, but that's the information in the cell that we call the epigenome.

Yeah.

So in science, what I like to do, I'm a reductionist, is to boil it down.

And I actually ended up boiling aging down to an equation.

which is the loss of information due to entropy.

It's a hard thing to overcome, the second law of thermodynamics, that's fair.

But this equation really represents the fact that I think aging is a loss of information in the same way that when you Xerox something a thousand times, you'll lose that information, or you try to copy a cassette tape, or even if you send information across the internet, some of it will get lost.

That's what I think is aging.

And there are two types of information in the body.

There is the genetic information, which is digital, A-T-C-G, the chemical letters of DNA.

But there's this other part of the information in the body that's just as important,

essential in fact and that's the systems that control which genes are switched on and off in what cell at what time in response to what we eat etc and it turns out that 80 of our future longevity and health is controlled by this second part the epigenetic information the control systems

I liken the DNA to the music that's on a DVD or a compact disc for the younger people.

We used to use these things.