Book Review
Lifespan 
David Sinclair
2/5 stars
"A somewhat silly book; full of a lot of the author's political opinions"

*******
Of the book:

-310 pages of prose/ 9 chapters + conclusion. (x-bar= 31/chapter)

-393 reference citations (=1.26/pages; well sourced)

I really don't see so much of what this author is telling us that we didn't already know. He coins the term "Information Theory of Aging," but we all know that, given enough time, enough mistakes will accumulate in DNA/various parts of the human body to make it such that we just don't live anymore--and it seems like he is splitting hairs about WHY it happens in order to come up with a unique definition THAT it happens, along with speculation about what his research will lead to--given enough time.

Even for all of the great bulk of words, it seems like much of this book is a restatement of that long known / knowable fact (about accumulation of DNA damage=eventual death).

The Elixir of Life is something that people have been searching for for a long time. I think the First Emperor of China spent all of his final years searching for said elixir --and died anyway.

Those events were 2,300 years ago, and if you believe in the Lindy effect..... If something goes on for x years, then there's no reason it cannot go on for another x. 

So, too, with this quest to eliminate aging.

I guess there's just enough life left in this idea to write *yet another* book.

*******
The information herein takes three tracks:

∆Track 1...What we already know: eat less (caloric restriction), exercise more, don't smoke.

∆Track 2...Things that are true in human beings in some limited/trivial sense, or that work well in rodents.

Example: The author goes through also a very long list of drugs and the format is something like: "Drug x reduces cancer types a, b, &c by 4% each over a lifetime." 

-But, how many pills are we practically talking about per day to affect practically significant change?  50? 100? And then, do the side effects make it such that it's not worth it?

-And even if this works for cancers a, b and c, we might still have another several dozen to go on which this medicine has no effect

Example: Resveratrol. This book talks it up, but a quick Google search of 10 random papers ALL say that it is quite overhyped and has no practical significance.

Dasatinib: this is a chemotherapeutic agent for leukemia. And, it works in mice, and this author is saying that if you're feeling old you could just go in for a shot of chemo for a week. But, it has been known for some time (by rheumatologists) that chemotherapeutic agents can calm down improperly dividing cells - - which is why it has been used for lupus and arthritis for decades by now. (As frequently as these things are used, wouldn't somebody have noticed that they had senolytic properties by now?)

A VERY OLD STORY. 

There is lots of the game about how this-works-well-in-rats-and-yeast - - but it doesn't necessarily in humans. (Maybe it's not bioavailable; Maybe it takes impractical amounts, such as >750 glasses of red wine per day to get comparable amounts of resveratrol.) 

∆Track 3.....Things that are speculatively true: IF X, THEN Y. And these things *must* come true, given enough experimental research. And they're just a few years away (kinda like nuclear fusion) . 

Second order thoughts:

1. What benefit is there to do research into this area? Not a few times have human beings developed technology *way* faster than they could figure out the way to handle it. (Antibiotics. Nuclear weapons.)

Without editorializing, I can say that if this "problem" is chipped away at........ The practical results are likely going to be worse than anybody can foresee.

There exists to such thing as a virus supercycle-- of some disputed periodicity-- (Laurie Garrett, "The Coming Plague"), and microbes outnumber human beings by ≈10^9:1 and have a generation time that is about 10^6 faster....

2. Part of "progress"/evolution is that things must die off in order for there to be selection. 

Both in the sense that people who hold some stupid idea (let's say foot binding, for example, which was practiced in China for 10 centuries) just have to die off in order for people to move on AND in the sense that less genetically fit organisms have to die in order for there to be a better final end product.

In the event of a long lived civilization that is EXTREMELY slow learning (China/India), if you create more long lived people does that slow down an already glacially-slow learning curve? Instead of 1~2 new ideas per millennium, we now have people that can take up 1~2 new idea every 100,000 years? (The life expectancy was about 32 years all the way from the Qin dynasty until probably a half century ago. Three generations per century with almost zero net gain of knowledge.)

Dianne Feinstein just died the other day in office at 90 years old. What would her job have been like at 120? Or 150?

If you disturb this 1.2 billion year equilibrium of people dying off at a certain rate to make room for more genetically fit ones, what is likely to happen?

3. If people get to the point where they could have minute to minute medical data, who keeps track of it? What do they do with it? 

Does anyone even know?

4. Has this author been living in academia too long?

- (p.250)" 70-year-old students sitting in the classroom with 90-year-old teachers to be retrained? (My 98-year-old just gave up her smartphone and reverted back to a flip phone because the technology was too much for her. My grandmother-in-law could not use an ATM at the age of 80. They were/are  both perfectly healthy people.)

-(p. 233): "Unless we act to ensure equality, we stand at the precipice of a world in which the Uber-Rich could ensure that their children, and even their companion animals, live far longer than some poor people's children do."

-(p.272): "The quality of our medical Care should not be predicated on age or income. A 90-year-old and a 30-year-old should be treated with the same enthusiastm and support."


5. Zora Neale Hurston quote,: "I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death."

*******
I don't know if the Fool's Gold of "all people being equal" keeps being that because it is some innate human desire, or if they are just enough people who keep repeating it enough to keep it alive.

Also, you can just define something as a "right"  and then that magically means that enough will exist for everyone (p.277). Yawn.

Verdict:  Maybe if I could manage to read 60 books per year, this would be one of them. If I only read 30, this would not be one of them. 

Weak/guarded recommendation.

Vocabulary:

xenohormetic
sirtuins
senolytic
NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide)
quercetin
dasatinib
senomorphic
Horvath clock
Hayflick limit
skillbatical

Quotes:

1. "On average, members of the US Congress are 20 years older than their constituents" (p.226).

2. "Males don't just differ from females at a few sites in the genome; they have a whole other chromosome." (p.182).

3. "There is simply no economic model for a world in which people live 40 years or more past the time of traditional retirement" (p.230).

Creepy: (p.161) Barbra Streisand ordered up a clone to replace her dog sammy, a curly haired Coton de Tulear.