Lifespan

Lifespan: Why We Age, and Why We Don't Have To

Her name was Vera, and for most of her life she had more energy than anyone around her. David Sinclair's paternal grandmother grew up in Hungary and fled to Australia with her son after the 1956 revolution was crushed. She got chased off Bondi Beach for wearing a bikini. She taught her grandson to drive. She insisted on being called Vera, not Grandma, because she loved the idea of staying young. But by her mid-eighties she was frail and sick and hardly got out of her chair. She died at ninety-two, and Sinclair writes that the person she'd really been had died years earlier.

Vera's story is the opening of Sinclair's book, and it shows the problem he wants to solve. She lived a long life, but not a healthy one, and her last decade was a slow loss of everything that made her herself. In his telling, that decline shouldn't be accepted as natural. That's the central claim of the book: aging isn't inevitable. It's a disease. And diseases can be treated.

It's the book that made biologists uneasy and journalists ecstatic. Lifespan: Why We Age, and Why We Don't Have To is one part rigorous science, one part manifesto, and one part personal testimony. Sinclair is a geneticist and professor at Harvard Medical School, co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, and one of the most cited researchers in his field. He's also a man who tends to get out ahead of the evidence, something he sometimes admits and his critics frequently point out. The book is exhilarating and occasionally overreaches. It's worth reading carefully, because the parts that hold up are extraordinary, and the parts that don't are instructive in their own way.