Dr. David Sinclair

Like a conductor.

Thank you.

Conductor, exactly.

but the conductor becomes demented over time.

What happens is when you have a chromosomal break, the sirtuins panic, they leave the DNA, what they're supposed to be doing, controlling the cell's identity,

And they go and they repair the DNA.

That's their other job.

They have two jobs, identity and repair.

So when you have this break, the sirtuins go away, they repair the problem, but they don't all go back in the next few minutes.

It's very quick.

They don't all go back to where they started.

So you've got like this tennis match that the sirtuins are the balls and they get hit over to the break, then hit back.

Most of them find the genes that they should go back to, but they don't all do that.

And that total game of tennis or ping pong, if you like, is what I believe causes the identity crisis and aging itself, causes aging in yeast cells.

It's why yeast cells don't live longer than 10 days.

And I believe it's why we struggle to live beyond 80 or 90.

Yes.

And the breakthrough happened in the lab as I was just leaving to go to Harvard.

I got a job at Harvard when I was 29, super excited.

And just as I was leaving, there was a big breakthrough that they actually kept it secret from me because they were worried I was going to work on it when I left.