Lifespan
In this paradigm-shifting book from acclaimed Harvard Medical School doctor and one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people on earth, Dr. David Sinclair reveals that everything we think we know about ageing is wrong, and shares the surprising, scientifically-proven methods that can help readers live younger, longer.For decades, the medical community has looked to a variety of reasons for why we age, and the consensus is that no one dies of old age; they die of age-related diseases. That's because ageing is not a disease – it is inevitable.But what if everything you think you know about ageing is wrong?What if ageing is a disease? And that disease is curable.In THE EVOLUTION OF AGEING, Dr. David Sinclair, one of the world’s foremost authorities on genetics and ageing, argues just that. He has dedicated his life’s work to chasing more than a longer lifespan – he wants to enable people to live longer, healthier, and disease-free well into our hundreds. In this book, he reveals a bold new theory of ageing, one that pinpoints a root cause of ageing that lies in an ancient genetic survival circuit. This genetic trick – a circuit designed to halt reproduction in order to repair damage to the genome –has enabled earth’s early microcosms to survive and evolve into more advanced organisms. But this same survival circuit is the reason we age: as genetic damage accumulates over our lifespans from UV rays, environmental toxins, and unhealthy diets, our genome is overwhelmed, causing gray hair, wrinkles, achy joints, heart issues, dementia, and, ultimately, death.But genes aren’t our destiny; we have more control over them than we’ve been taught to believe. We can’t change our DNA, but we can harness the power of the epigenome to realise the true potential of our genes. Drawing on his cutting-edge findings at the forefront of medical research, Dr. Sinclair will provide a scientifically-proven roadmap to reverse the genetic clock by activating our vitality genes, so we can live younger longer. Readers will discover how a few simple lifestyle changes – like intermittent fasting, avoiding too much animal protein, limiting sugar, avoiding x-rays, exercising with the right intensity, and even trying cold therapy – can activate our vitality genes. Dr. Sinclair ends the book with a look to the near future, exploring what the world might look like – and what will need to change – when we are all living well to 120 or more.Dr. Sinclair takes what we have long accepted as the limits of human potential and mortality and turns them into choices. THE EVOLUTION OF AGEING is destined to be the biggest book on genes, biology, and longevity of this decade.
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Copyright
Thorsons
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
This UK edition published by Thorsons 2019
FIRST EDITION
© David Sinclair PhD 2019
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover illustration © MGB Watercolor Art 2019
Illustrations and Sinclairfont by Catherine L. Delphia
Illustrations in Cast of Characters by David Sinclair
Thanks to Christine Liu and her team at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) for permission to use the Glossary icons. Thanks to Wikipedia for biographical facts in the cast of characters.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
David Sinclair PhD asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008353742
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008292362
Version 2019-10-29
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Dedication
THE BUSH. In the wild and wonderful world of the Garigal clan, waterfalls and saltwater estuaries wind through ancient sandstone escarpments, under shadowy canopies of charred bloodwoods, angophoras, and scribbly gums that kookaburras, currawongs, and wallabies call home.
INTRODUCTION
A GRANDMOTHER’S PRAYER
I GREW UP ON THE EDGE OF THE BUSH. IN FIGURATIVE TERMS, MY BACKYARD was a hundred-acre wood. In literal terms, it was much bigger than that. It went on as far as my young eyes could see, and I never grew tired of exploring it. I would hike and hike, stopping to study the birds, the insects, the reptiles. I pulled things apart. I rubbed the dirt between my fingers. I listened to the sounds of the wild and tried to connect them to their sources.
And I played. I made swords from sticks and forts from rocks. I climbed trees and swung on branches and dangled my legs over steep precipices and jumped off of things that I probably shouldn’t have jumped off. I imagined myself as an astronaut on a distant planet. I pretended to be a hunter on safari. I lifted my voice for the animals as though they were an audience at the opera house.
“Coooeey!” I would holler, which means “Come here” in the language of the Garigal people, the original inhabitants.
I wasn’t unique in any of this, of course. There were lots of kids in the northern suburbs of Sydney who shared my love of adventure and exploration and imagination. We expect this of children. We want them to play this way.
Until, of course, they’re “too old” for that sort of thing. Then we want them to go to school. Then we want them to go to work. To find a partner. To save up. To buy a house.
Because, you know, the clock is ticking.
My grandmother was the first person to tell me that it didn’t have to be that way. Or, I guess, she didn’t tell me so much as show me.
She had grown up in Hungary, where she spent Bohemian summers swimming in the cool waters of Lake Balaton and hiking in the mountains of its northern shore at a holiday resort that catered to actors, painters, and poets. In the winter months, she helped run a hotel in the Buda Hills before the Nazis took it over and converted it to the central command of the Schutzstaffel, or “SS.”
A decade after the war, in the early days of the Soviet occupation, the Communists began to shut down the borders. When her mother tried to cross illegally into Austria, she was caught, arrested, and sentenced to two years in jail and died shortly after. During the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, my grandmother wrote and distributed anti-Communist newsletters in the streets of Budapest. After the revolution was crushed, the Soviets began arresting tens of thousands of dissidents, and she fled to Australia with her son, my father, reasoning that it was the furthest they could get from Europe.
She never set foot in Europe again, but she brought every bit of Bohemia with her. She was, I have been told, one of the first women to sport a bikini in Australia and got chased off Bondi Beach because of it. She spent years living in New Guinea—which even today is one of the most intensely rugged places on our planet—all by herself.
