At Abundance 360, David Sinclair made quite a number of encouraging comments about the future of aging research, including methods of resetting epigenetics to a youthful state. Emmett Short discusses these comments on this episode of Lifespan News.
Script
Welcome to Lifespan News. My last video on David Sinclair’s new research into an age-reversal pill did a lot better than usual. It’s got like 50,000 views as of right now, so if you haven’t seen that check it out but You guys had a lot to say about it so stick around to the end because I’ll be commenting on some of your comments. Speaking of comments, make sure to follow us on X and for all the latest articles on new longevity research, visit Lifespan.io.
But first, the mad scientist David Sinclair, this time with Peter Diamandis at Abundance 360, giving more details into human trials for the genetic engineering side of the technology versus the chemical and pill side of the technology. Which would you want more? We’ll also hear David’s thoughts on how AI will affect the advancement of this tech. Spoiler: A lot. I’m going to play the best parts and add my commentary along the way.
Aging isn’t just damage to the body, like we wear out. It’s actually a loss of information.
This is a key principle in David Sinclair’s research. It means most of the progress we’ve made in traditional medicine to repair the macro systems of the body like a worn out heart, worn out knees etc. could be obsolete. If you can rejuvenate at the cellular level, than everything made out of cells, which is everything, will become young again. He’s essentially trying to communicate with the programming language of cells through the use of genetic proteins, called Yamanaka factors, and with his recent research, communicate with chemical cocktails. My personal favorite way to communicate. But most of what he’s talking about at the beginning of this interview is about the genetic intervention accomplished with the Yamanaka factors delivered by hijacking a virus.
We were able to control the aging process in a colony of mice, driving them forwards and backwards in their age and making them get diseases. And now we’re even reversing those.
Diabolical, and I’ll allow it.
Do you think there is an upper limit to human aging? Well, I know there isn’t. You know there is not. Yeah. Yeah, It’s not even a question.
Okay, before we go much further, I do want to address a lot of the comments from the last video about whether or not David Sinclair can be trusted. Look at how many comments are throwing shade. A few of these comments actually touch on real controversies surrounding David Sinclair. Some of this doesn’t look great, but it’s also hard to know what the nuances there and how much it matters. Because this other comment points out, we have moved to primate trials that were successful and now we expect human trials in a matter of months.
And by the way, the man continues to be a Harvard professor and the head of a research department at Harvard. So I’m afraid I can’t give you a definitive answer on the David Sinclair controversy, so I am going to air on the side of optimism, and I’m gonna take the gamble that the Harvard professor knows what he’s talking about. Call me crazy, but that’s what I’m going with.
We’ve been able to extend the lifespan of every species that we’ve tried to extend the lifespan of. And we’re no different from those species. There are many species who are very similar to us genetically, biologically, that live a lot longer than we do. The best example would be the bowhead whale. But a lot of whales live longer than us. There is no law that says we must age, remember that.
I think we all believe that otherwise why are we still watching this video, right? Tell us about the breakthrough.
We’ve made a major breakthrough in our understanding of not just why we age, but also how to control that process. There’s a back up copy of information in every cell, in every body’s cells, and that that backup copy can be accessed and there’s a switch that you can flip that allows cells to reset their biological age and function again as though they were young because literally they are young again. And the fact that there is a backup copy changes everything. We know. I’m no longer talking about slowing aging. I’m talking about true age reversal, multiple times. We made this discovery that you can reset the age of cells, human tissue, mouse tissue, living mice.
Okay, good, I’m glad he clarified living mice, otherwise it’s like “Well, we kind of cured aging. But there is a slight snag. Uh, how does everyone feel about the term undead? Is there a market for zombie pills? No? Ok back to the drawing board.”
We’re now growing human brains.
That’s new.
We can grow these organoids from human tissue, and make them really old within a matter of weeks; they develop dementia.
You could stop there. If he wasn’t trying to cure aging, you’d be like, “Is this a super villain?”
We can reverse the age of those little organoids and their electrical activity comes back. The whole brain is reversible.
I got some memories I’d like to reverse.
We can reverse the age of an old mouse’s brain. We just give them an intravenous injection of our therapy, turn it on for four weeks, and those mice have a young brain and the ability to learn again. It’s my prediction that in the next 18 months, or two years, we’ll be testing our first age-reverse-like clinical trial in humans to cure blindness.
This guy knows how to get funding. He’s straight up copying Mr. Beast! Worked out for him!
It’s likely that a real rejuvenation therapeutic will if it works for one tissue, an organ will work for the entire body. That’s also lucky. But it’s true. That’s what we find in animals. What works in the eye, in the optic nerves, the nerve cells, works in the epithelial cells in the retina, works in the outer layer of cells on the retina. It works in the kidney. We just published the muscle cell. You know, if it works in all those different cell types, I think it’s a universal process of biology to be able to be reset. And so that’s why I’m not exaggerating when I think a whole-body reset is coming. I haven’t injected myself yet. I’m probably not going to do that for a few years.
I love that he’s talking about injecting himself. This is the kind of mad scientist I can get behind. David Sinclair is so much cooler than Bryan Johnson. Bryan Johnson who is out there eating nothing but pills. Shooting lasers into his dick, wearing halter tops. Drinking his sons blood. Hey to each their own but, I like the guy who is quietly curing blindness and one day you’ll be like wait you look like a teenager, you, you took it didn’t you? You look prepubescent you son of a bitch. But I mean how long until they can cure more than just blindness?
So right now, as far as I’m aware, nobody else is developing a product for in the clinic that is has an on off switch. I think that’s important for two reasons. You’re saying we’re going to put these three genes, the OSK genes in all the cells in your body, but we’re going to have to turn it on. Otherwise it’s inactive. It starts out off correct?
Yeah. And that’s what we did in this paper in Nature. And this new one in Cell is that we have exquisite control over when these genes come on for safety reasons, but also because we now know in the mice at least, you can reset multiple times. So that you’ll have this treatment. Your body will be filled with these genes, they’ll be off. And if we get sick or if we get injured or if we get too old, we can take a course of an antibiotic for a couple of months and get reset every time. Or for in the emergency room, they give you an infusion of doxycycline. On come these repair genes, your nose, regrow, your spine regenerates, etc. We needed to know if it was safe. It’s it’s very safe. We’ve never seen anything negative. After years of work and driving this process, we found that those three genes, O, S, and K for short, these are gene regulators that set off a cascade of events during embryogenesis to make a young human turns out, lucky for all of us, I think, is that those three genes also set back the clock in adult cells without causing tumors or any disease. And this is the thing that that blows my mind is you’d think that if you just keep it on for a long time, you’d go back to zero. Age zero, which you don’t want. cells go back about 80% and stop. There’s a barrier that prevents them from going back to zero. It’s a gift to humanity.
Speak for yourself, man. I wanna go full Benji Buttonhole. I wanna get all look who’s talking up in here. Start selling insurance. That’s a strong career move. In a future full of ai. And robot workers? I’ll be the creepy old baby guy. That guy get’s booked. I don’t know, I might mess around and go full tadpole, don’t limit me dude!
It’s already here. It’s just not available widely. It’s already here. Ladies and gentlemen.
I love how Peter Diamandis has to beg for applause for the fountain of youth. I think people are either in awe or they just do not believe it’s true. As many of you in the comments articulated.
Right now, it’s a gene therapy, which means it’s it’s going to be expensive and hard to fulfill our dreams of changing humanity. That said, what we want to do is we want to turn those gene therapies into a pill. And so you can take a course of a pill and get the same effect. I already have some molecules in the lab that show signs of age reversal. And it’s actually easier to distribute molecules than it is viruses. So I would expand that group and screen millions of molecules for those ones. That in combination could be taken. Either you could have a cosmetic company, you could have probably one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies. That’s a land that is no longer the backwater of biology, really it’s pharmaceutical development. And those that capture that land will be the dominant industry of this century.
The biotech revolution is imminent and I personally don’t think it will be just for the wealthy.
Is this just a treatment for the wealthy? Hmm. And we saw the study done by one school of business, Oxford, Harvard, that reducing age one year in the global population adds $38 trillion in a global economy, so it really is an uplifting of humanity. So you think we will get as we get to volume, we will get to a point where this is accessible, affordable, and made available to everybody.
Or I’ll die trying.
I too, am optimistic, and you can call me naïve for taking the word of a mere Harvard professor and director of research, but that’s my take.