From an acclaimed Harvard professor and one of Time's most influential people, this paradigm-shifting book shows how almost everything we think we know about aging is wrong, offers a front-row seat to the amazing global effort to slow, stop, and reverse aging, and calls readers to consider a future where aging can be treated.

For decades, experts have believed that we are at the mercy of our genes, and that natural damage to our genes-the kind that inevitably happens as we get older-makes us become sick and grow old.

But what if everything you think you know about aging is wrong? What if aging is a disease-and that disease is treatable?

In Lifespan, one of the world's foremost experts on aging and genetics reveals a groundbreaking new theory that will forever change the way we think about why we age and what we can do about it. Aging isn't immutable; we can have far more control over it than we realize. This eye-opening and provocative work takes us to the frontlines of research that is pushing the boundaries on our perceived scientific limitations, revealing incredible breakthroughs-many from Dr. David Sinclair's own lab-that demonstrate how we can slow down, or even reverse, the genetic clock. The key is activating newly discovered vitality genes-the decedents of an ancient survival circuit that is both the cause of aging and the key to reversing it. Dr. Sinclair shares the emerging technologies and simple lifestyle changes-such as intermittent fasting, cold exposure, and exercising with the right intensity-that have been shown to help lead to longer lives.

Lifespan provides a roadmap for taking charge of our own health destiny and a bold new vision for the future when humankind is able to live to be 100 years young.

“This is the most visionary book about aging I have ever read. Seize the day—and seize this book!”

Autorentext
David Sinclair, PhD, AO, is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. One of the leading innovators of his generation, he has been named by Time as “one of the 100 most influential people in the world” and top fifty most influential people in healthcare. He is a board member of the American Federation for Aging Research and has received more than thirty-five awards for his research and major scientific breakthroughs. Dr. Sinclair and his work have been featured on 60 Minutes, Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, and Newsweek, among others. He lives in Boston and enjoys hiking and kayaking with his wife and three children. To learn more, visit LifespanBook.com and follow him on Twitter @DavidASinclair.

Matthew LaPlante is an associate professor of journalistic writing at Utah State University, where he teaches news reporting and feature writing. A former US Navy intelligence specialist and Middle East war correspondent, he is the author of Superlative: The Biology of Extremes and the cowriter of multiple other books on the intersection of science and society. He lives in Salt Lake City and skis in Big Cottonwood Canyon. To learn more, visit MDLaPlante.com and follow him on Twitter @MDLaPlante.

Leseprobe
Lifespan 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.

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.

Even when we were very young, my grandmother didn't want us to call her "grandmother." Nor did she like the Hungarian term, "nagymama," or any of the other warm terms of endearment such as "bubbie," "grandma," and "nana."

To us boys