Astral Codex Ten

Lifespan

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Lifespan

Article

Lifespan is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 02, 2021 and July 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “author of Lifespan”; “If Lifespan gave an explanation for this, I missed it”; “The impression I get from Lifespan is that all of these things”. It most often appears alongside David Sinclair, Harvard, 2017 NYT article on UFOs.

Metadata

  • Category: Books
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: December 02, 2021
  • Last seen: July 06, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Lifespan
December 02, 2021 · Original source
David Sinclair - Harvard professor, celebrity biologist, and author of Lifespan - thinks solving aging will be easy. “Aging is going to be remarkably easy to tackle. Easier than cancer” are his exact words, which is maybe less encouraging than he thinks.
Inline links: Lifespan
Epigenetic damage could potentially still be unfixable: how do you convince the thousands of different intermixed cell types in the body to all be the right type again? But Sinclair thinks the body already has a mechanism for doing this: epigenetic repair proteins called sirtuins. I’m a bit confused about where sirtuins are getting their information from: is there a backup copy of epigenetics that they read to figure out what’s wrong and needs repair? I get the impression from one or two cryptic statements that Sinclair thinks maybe yes (see the discussion of “the observer” on page 171). But for some reason, the system works well enough to keep you alive for the normal human lifespan (and no better).
If you want to live longer, can you just add more sirtuins? These people say they gave mice a gene that caused them to overproduce sirtuins, and the mice lived 30% longer. Other people have tried the same experiment in worms, fruit flies, etc, with controversial but generally positive results.
Inline links: These people say, controversial
Links For July 2023
July 06, 2023 · Original source
6: Derek Lowe explains the current consensus that sirtuins don’t work for longevity. This doesn’t directly invalidate all of David Sinclair’s work (which I wrote about in my review of his book Lifespan) but it sure does indirectly undermine it.
Inline links: sirtuins don’t work for longevity, my review of his book