Dr. David Sinclair's Lifespan - A Book Review

We are obsessed with age in this country. Society has an infinite number of rules, prejudices, and preconceptions about getting older. Perhaps it is the fear of death or the fact that aging is the one thing that binds us all - whatever it is, we cannot escape the fact that aging is a part of our lives, and is inescapable. We all have to age, right? Dr. David Sinclair disagrees.

Is aging an inevitability?

Is aging an inevitability?

Dr. Sinclair is the Harvard Medical School scientist and author of Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don't Have To. In this New York Times Bestseller, he argues that aging is not a certainty and instead of thinking of it as an inevitability, aging can be thought of as “a disease, and that disease is treatable.”

The arguments set out in Lifespan treat the “final frontier” of science as a goal that is well within our grasp. This isn’t a book that preaches spirituality or finding solace in aging, it is about the scientific research that Dr. Sinclair is at the forefront of.

I didn’t find this book an easy read. Unlike some of the other books I have reviewed on this site, it isn’t something to put on the nightstand and read casually before bed. There are over 400 pages full of scientific research, summaries of current theories on aging, and predictions for the near future. Be prepared to come away from this book with a working knowledge of DNA transcription, epigenetics, sirtuins, and other terms that won’t make sense until you get through this tome of information.

For thousands of years, we have looked at aging with an air of mystery. It is only in the last few decades that the black boxes of human aging - the contents of the cell and DNA in general - have been opened. It is impossible to say for certain what the future holds for us individually, but reading the works of Dr. Sinclair can open up a glimpse into what comes next for the human race in general.

Who knows for sure? Maybe sometime soon aging will be a thing of the past. But for now, all we can do is try to understand the scientific process of aging, and why we age. And for that, you can’t do better than Lifespan by Dr. David Sinclair.

Jon Straub