David A. Sinclair

Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
Print: COPYRIGHT: 9/10/2019; ISBN 978-1501191978; PUBLISHER: Atria Books; Illustrated edition; PAGES 432; Unabridged

Digital: PUBLISHER: Atria Books. Kindle Edition

*(This version) Audio: COPYRIGHT: 9/10/2019; ISBN: 9781508296058; PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster Audio; DURATION: 11:56:56; PARTS: 10; File Size: 343687 KB; Unabridged (Overdrive LAPL)

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
How I picked it: I saw a print copy at the Newport Beach Friends of the Library bookshop that looked intriguing.
The promising progress in the research that’s been done on aging, and thoughts about what effect longer lives would have on our planet and living conditions.
What did I think? I felt that I learned quite a bit, and found it all interesting. A lot of research seems to be about wishful thinking, until there’s a breakthrough and suddenly the improbable becomes reality. Steps may be incremental, but it still sounds like progress.

AUTHOR:
David A. Sinclair:
From Wikipedia:
“David Andrew Sinclair AO (born June 26, 1969)[2] is an Australian biologist and academic known for his research on aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and is the co-director of its Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research.[3] He is an officer of the Order of Australia (AO).
Sinclair has appeared in Time magazine, The New York Times, The Charlie Rose Show, 60 Minutes, Boston magazine, The Washington Post, The Economist, TED and The Joe Rogan Experience.”

NARRATOR:
Mathew D. LaPlante
From Utah State University:
“Matthew LaPlante is an author, journalist, radio program host, advocate for educational equity, climate scientist, and associate professor of journalistic writing at Utah State University”

David A. Sinclair
See under Author

*Great narrations. David narrates the chapters and then between chapters Matthew serves as interviewer.

GENRE:
Nonfiction; Health & Fitness; Science

SUBJECTS:
Aging; Research; Epigenetics; Academia

DEDICATION
“To my grandmother Vera, who taught me to see the world the way it could be. To my mother, Diana, who cared more about her children than herself. To my wife, Sandra, my bedrock. And to my great-great-grandchildren; I am looking forward to meeting you.”

EXCERPT from Chapter 1:
“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. 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.
Though her bloodline was Ashkenazi Jew and she had been raised a Lutheran, my grandmother was a very secular person. Our equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer was the English author Alan Alexander Milne’s poem “Now We Are Six,” which ends:
But now I am six, I’m as clever as clever. So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.
She read that poem to my brother and me again and again. Six, she told us, was the very best age, and she did her damnedest to live life with the spirit and awe of a child of that age.”

RATING:
4

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
2-25-2023 to 3/9/2023
… (more)

Thought provoking. Between chapters the reader and author had conversations making the listening experience more personal.
The authors basic point is that aging is a disease. It is a disease of losing information from the genetic code and its interaction with the ’epigenome’. He is very enthusiastic about what he has learned.
He isn’t suggesting we might never die but that we would feel healthy and remain active until death.
There may be problems with a population that lives twice as long- his expectation. But he feels human ingenuity is up to the task.
At 77 I am probably too old to be a major beneficiary from the things his lab is learning. Still it is a very upbeat and hopeful message.… (more)

I've been reading sf stories about life extension for a class I will teach, but I've also been reading books recommended by one of my co-teachers about the actuality of it. This one is by a Harvard Medical School researcher into aging. Compared to _target="_top">some others that I have read, it has more of a real science feel. It's somewhat written in that breathless style of popular science journalism, but not as often. There's some real science in here, or at least so it seems from the perspective of this nonscientist.

I also appreciated that Sinclair thinks through some of the social consequences of longer lifespan, and he has good answers where he can. Some areas, he freely admits, don't have good answers: the rich will gain access first, and longer lifespan will allow the rich to acquire even more, creating a feedback loop. (This is something I've seen in a number of the sf stories I've read.) On the other hand, I wasn't convinced by all his answers: he says we'll save money from not having to treat diseases that are symptoms of aging... but since he's not promising immortality, wouldn't those diseases catch up with us again at some point?

The book is clearly trying to be accessible but also not be fluff. I think it fails in threading the needle when it comes to explaining epigenetics, which is the key to Sinclair's theory of aging, but which I totally failed to understand the explanation of; it's a mixture of too-much technical detail and too-dumbed down analogies.

But on the whole, I found this to be one of the more convincing advocacies of anti-aging I've read. Should I start taking the supplements he recommends to extend my own lifespan...?… (more)