Complaining About Hype in the Longevity Industry
The author of this commentary is overly critical of the science of rejuvenation as a whole, if one takes a tour of his work, but here he makes legitimate points about the harms done by an excess of hype. He picks on one of the easier targets, the publicity that David Sinclair has generated for his work, initially on sirtuins and later on reprogramming, with which it is fairly easy to find issues. Raising awareness, marketing potential programs, is a necessary evil in the matter of directing funding into new fields, but unrealistic promises sustained over time become damaging.
Is aging treatable? In the sense that the rate of aging can be modified by genes and the environment, yes. However, aging is easy to accelerate, i.e. by smoking, overweight, infectious diseases, and other factors, and much harder to slow. Do sirtuins extend lifespan in yeast, invertebrates and vertebrates? Has David Sinclair discovered sirtuin activators? Based on 25 years of work by academic and industrial investigators, the clear answer to both questions is no. Whereas Sinclair claims that sirtuins are dominantly acting longevity genes from yeast to humans, early reports of sirtuins extending lifespan in invertebrates could not be independently replicated. In 2011, researchers from 7 institutions published together that sirtuin genes do not extend lifespan in worms or flies.
Sinclair's theories were au courant for two decades. Indeed, sirtuins and resveratrol have been subjects of hundreds of stories in the mass media. A 2008article reported that sirtuin activators would be developed as diabetes medications that, as a side effect, would extend lifespan. The global interest in sirtuins and sirtuin activators was such that companies - most notably GSK - spent many billions of dollars trying to get a positive result and could not because the so-called sirtuin activators do not activate sirtuins and because sirtuins are not longevity genes. Sinclair's book Lifespan therefore represents a pivot in which a person central to the failure of the largest longevity medicine program in pharmaceutical history turns to the general public to retell his story. In the retelling, sirtuins are longevity genes and sirtuin activators are real.