Dr. David Sinclair

But there's another interesting thing you brought up, which is that we're finding that the genes that get messed up, that get scratched,

that are leading to aging are those early developmental genes.

They come on late in life and just mess up the system.

And they seem to be particularly susceptible to those scratches.

So what's causing the scratches?

Well, we know of a couple of things in my lab, we figured out.

One is broken chromosomes, DNA damage, particularly cuts to the DNA breaks.

So if you have an X-ray or a cosmic ray, or even if you go out in the sun and you'll get your broken chromosomes,

that accelerates the unwinding of those beautiful DNA loops that I mentioned.

we can actually do this to a mouse.

We can accelerate that process and we get an old mouse, 50% older, and it has this bent spine, kyphosis, it has gray hair, its organs are old.

So we now can control aging in the forward direction.

The other thing that accelerates aging is massive cell damage or stress.

So we pinched nerves and we saw that their aging process was accelerated as well.

Well, yeah, I don't want to scare anybody.

Sure.

There are studies that show that the slower you take to develop, it also is predictive of having a longer, healthier life.

And it may have something to do with growth hormone.

We know that growth hormone is pro-aging.

Anyone who's taking growth hormone for a short amount of time, you'll build up muscle, you feel great.