Lifespan

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

Her name was Vera, and she should not have been in the garden at eighty-something, hauling bags of compost across the Sydney lawn. But there she was -- David Sinclair's maternal grandmother, moving with the kind of energy most people lose by sixty. She ate little. She worked in the dirt most mornings. She laughed loudly and slept well and had no particular interest in slowing down. She outlived her husband by decades. When Sinclair, already deep into his longevity research at Harvard Medical School, would visit her in Australia, he would watch her and wonder: what is she doing that the others are not?

Vera was not a medical miracle. She had no access to experimental compounds. She did not know what a sirtuin was. But she had, apparently by instinct, stumbled onto several of the survival behaviors that Sinclair would spend his career trying to quantify. She under-ate. She moved. She spent time in cold. She was, in his telling, a living argument for the central claim of his 2019 book: aging is not inevitable. It is a disease. And diseases can be treated.

This is the book that made biologists uncomfortable 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. David 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 is also a man with a habit of getting out ahead of the evidence -- something he acknowledges, sometimes, and something his critics remind him of frequently. The book is exhilarating and occasionally overreaching. It is worth reading carefully, because the parts that hold up are extraordinary, and the parts that don't are instructive in their own way.