The Longevity Revolution Is Here | Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair - Season 2, Episode 1

Mission and Statistics02:02

My life's mission is to extend healthy lifespan for all. And that's why I founded Lifespan, which exists to help you and your loved ones live your longest, healthiest lives. We're building the world's largest longevity community and supporting medical research through the nonprofit Lifespan Foundation. Of the 150,000 people around the world that die every day, approximately two-thirds of those are due to age-related diseases and conditions with aging at the root cause of those. Hence, we can dramatically improve human health by targeting aging itself. We are in a new era and lifespan covers what you need to know about the exciting world of aging and longevity science.

Production and Smartboard02:30

In making this episode, I used everything from tennis balls to DNA models to show you how cellular software might be rebooted. I recorded this over many weeks because it was really hard to make. We looked at thousands of papers and double and triple checked every fact and even re-recorded parts for accuracy. And with that, let's go to my left here. I'm excited to introduce the Lifespan Smartboard. This board here. I can go up, I can touch it. We can zoom in on figures from papers. And every show will be examining the science on that whiteboard and also bringing up video chats and other things. To my right here, we have a glass cabinet as part of this beautiful old library that I've filled with objects of interest that I'm going to bring out throughout the shows going forward. And they will illustrate what I'm talking about from DNA molecules to the Wright brothers plane.

Arthur C. Clarke Quote and ER 100 Milestone03:31

Even Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer who features in my book Lifespan, famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And if you've not yet heard the news, I'm excited to inform you. The technology is coming. One of the most exciting milestones happened recently in January 2026 when Life Biosciences drug candidate called ER 100 became the world's first epigenetic reprogramming therapy to be cleared for human clinical trials by the FDA. The tech is essentially a gene therapy that came straight out of my lab from my student Wanglu. It's the same tech that we published on the cover of Nature in 2020 that we showed reverses aging and cures blindness in mice. Professor Bruce Cassander, Sharon Rosen Wy Gibson, and her team at Life Bio have since shown that this tech also works in monkeys to restore visual function. And we're about to learn if it works in humans to reverse vision loss. And from there, just pick your organ of interest. Ear, kidney, heart, liver, skin. The possibilities are just too numerous to list. I'll talk much more about all of that later and give updates on how the trial goes in later episodes.