few minutes later, all of the education, wisdom, and memories that we cherished, and all of our future potential, will be irreversibly erased. (Location 121)
“There is no natural death, unlike the picture we like to paint of the father who dies quietly in his sleep, surrounded by his loved ones. I don’t believe in that.” (Location 131)
Do your part to make humanity be the best it can be. Don’t waste a moment. Embrace your youth; hold on to it for as long as you can. Fight for it. Fight for it. Never stop fighting for it. (Location 160)
Prolonged vitality—meaning not just more years of life but more active, healthy, and happy ones—is coming. It is coming sooner than most people expect. (Location 248)
Science has since demonstrated that the positive health effects attainable from an antioxidant-rich diet are more likely caused by stimulating the body’s natural defenses against aging, including boosting the production of the body’s enzymes that eliminate free radicals, not as a result of the antioxidant activity itself. (Location 447)
When a theory succeeds at explaining previously unexplainable observations about the world, it becomes a tool that scientists can use to discover even more. (Location 478)
the genome were a computer, the epigenome would be the software. It instructs the newly divided cells on what type of cells they should be and what they should remain, sometimes for decades, as in the case of individual brain neurons and certain immune cells. (Location 548)
Together, these genes form a surveillance network within our bodies, communicating with one another between cells and between organs by releasing proteins and chemicals into the bloodstream, monitoring and responding to what we eat, how much we exercise, and what time of day it is. They tell us to hunker down when the going gets tough, and they tell us to grow fast and reproduce fast when the going gets easier. (Location 579)
The longevity genes I work on are called “sirtuins,” named after the yeast SIR2 gene, the first one to be discovered. There are seven sirtuins in mammals, SIRT1 to SIRT7, and they are made by almost every cell in the body. (Location 585)
They have also evolved to require a molecule called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD. As we will see later, the loss of NAD as we age, and the resulting decline in sirtuin activity, is thought to be a primary reason our bodies develop diseases when we are old but not when we are young. (Location 591)
Like that of sirtuins, mTOR activity is exquisitely regulated by nutrients. And like the sirtuins, mTOR can signal cells in stress to hunker down and improve survival by boosting such activities as DNA repair, reducing inflammation caused by senescent cells, (Location 606)
The other pathway is a metabolic control enzyme known as AMPK, which evolved to respond to low energy levels. It has also been highly conserved among species and, as with sirtuins and TOR, we have learned a lot about how to control it. (Location 614)
Here’s the important point: there are plenty of stressors that will activate longevity genes without damaging the cell, including certain types of exercise, intermittent fasting, low-protein diets, and exposure to hot and cold temperatures (I discuss this in chapter 4). That’s called hormesis. (Location 619)
The pianist that makes this happen is the epigenome. Through a process of revealing our DNA or bundling it up in tight protein packages, and by marking genes with chemical tags called methyls and acetyls composed of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, the epigenome uses our genome to make the music of our lives. (Location 783)
Because by the time an average yeast cell expires, it is surrounded by 225, or 33 million, of its descendants. (Location 828)
Youth → broken DNA → genome instability → disruption of DNA packaging and gene regulation (the epigenome) → loss of cell identity → cellular senescence → disease → death. (Location 844)
had noticed that yeast cells fed with lower amounts of sugar were not just living longer, but their rDNA was exceptionally compact—significantly delaying the inevitable ERC accumulation, catastrophic numbers of DNA breaks, nucleolar explosion, sterility, and death. (Location 890)
We tend to think of aging as something that begins happening to us at midlife, because that’s when we start to see significant changes to our bodies. But Horvath’s clock begins ticking the moment we are born. (Location 1006)
of the symptoms of aging—the conditions that push mice, like humans, farther toward the precipice of death—were being caused not by mutation but by the epigenetic changes that come as a result of DNA damage signals. (Location 1015)
When we stay healthy and vibrant, as long as we feel young physically and mentally, our age doesn’t matter. (Location 1475)
feeling younger than your age predicts lower mortality and better cognitive abilities later in life.22 It’s a virtuous cycle, as long as you keep pedaling. (Location 1477)
more veggies and less meat; fresh food versus processed food. We all know this stuff, though applying it can be a challenge. (Location 1520)
it’s probably better to start earlier than later, perhaps after age 40, when things really start to go downhill, molecularly speaking. (Location 1619)
exposing your body to less-than-comfortable temperatures is another very effective way to turn on your longevity genes. (Location 1803)
Our genes didn’t evolve for a life of pampered comfort. A little stress to induce hormesis once in a while likely goes a long way. (Location 1899)
To us, the second and the millimeter are short divisions of time and space, but to an enzyme about 10 nanometers across and vibrating every quadrillionth of a second, a millimeter is the size of a continent and a second is more than a year. (Location 1977)
“There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble.” (Location 1998)
aging is an increase in entropy, a loss of information leading to disorder. (Location 2001)
high blood sugar is causing the premature deaths of 3.8 million people a year. These deaths do not come quickly and compassionately but in horrific ways, with blindness, kidney failure, stroke, open foot wounds, and limb amputations. (Location 2071)
The drug, now most commonly called metformin, has since become one of the most widely taken and effective medicines on the globe. It’s among the medications on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines, a catalog of the most effective, safe, and cost-effective therapies for the world’s most prevalent medical conditions. (Location 2076)
people taking metformin were living notably healthier lives—independent, it seemed, of its effect on diabetes. (Location 2083)
We also knew that many other health-promoting molecules, and chemical derivatives of them, are produced in abundance by stressed plants; we get resveratrol from grapes, aspirin from willow bark, metformin from lilacs, epigallocatechin gallate from green tea, quercetin from fruits, and allicin from garlic. (Location 2180)
Metformin is already widely used to improve ovulation in women with infrequent or prolonged menstrual periods as a result of polycystic ovary syndrome. (Location 2341)
imagine what the world will discover now that we’re actively and intentionally looking for molecules that engage our in-built defenses. (Location 2407)
Armies of chemists are now working to create and analyze natural and synthetic molecules that have the potential to be even better at suppressing epigenomic noise and resetting our epigenetic landscape. (Location 2408)
There will come a time in which significantly prolonged vitality is indeed only a few pills away; there are too many promising leads, too many talented researchers, and too much momentum for it to be otherwise. (Location 2415)
Yes, the solution to aging could be cellular reprogramming, a resetting of the landscape—the (Location 2592)
DNA blueprint to be young, after all, is always there, even when we are old. (Location 2594)
Together, all the DNA in our body, if laid end to end, would stretch twice the diameter of the solar system. (Location 2600)
He coined the term precision medicine to describe the promise of next-generation health monitoring, genome sequencing, and analytics for treating patients based on personal data, not diagnostic manuals. (Location 2842)
Thanks to the plummeting prices of DNA sequencing, wearable devices, massive computing power, and artificial intelligence, we’re moving into a world in which treatment decisions no longer have to be based on what is best for most people most of the time. (Location 2844)
checkpoint blockade therapy, quashes the ability of cancerous cells to evade detection by our immune systems. (Location 2859)
There are 3.234 billion base pairs, or letters, in the human genome. In 1990, when the Human Genome Project was launched, it cost about $10 to read just one letter in the genome, an A, G, C, or T. The entire project took ten years, thousands of scientists, and cost a few billion dollars. And that was for one genome. (Location 2893)
most of medical history, our treatments and therapies have been based on what was best for males, (Location 2918)
Car buyers increasingly expect features such as tire sensors, passenger sensors, climate sensors, nighttime pedestrian warning sensors, steering angle guides, proximity alerts, ambient light sensors, washer fluid sensors, automatic high-beam, rain sensors, blind spot detection sensors, automatic suspension lift, voice recognition, automatic reverse parking, active cruise control, auto emergency braking, and autopilot. (Location 2999)
Our watches monitor our heart rate, measure our sleep cycles, and can even provide suggestions for food intake and activity. Athletes and health conscious individuals are increasingly wearing sensors twenty-four hours a day that monitor the ways in which their vital signs and major chemicals are rising and falling in response to diet, stress, training, and competition. (Location 3008)
This could happen again. And given how much more humans and animals are in contact and how much more interconnected our planet is now than it was (Location 3111)
doesn’t matter if we live decades upon decades longer if a pandemic quickly snuffs out hundreds of millions of lives—negating and even rolling back the gains in average lifespan we will have achieved. (Location 3113)
Ensuring the next big outbreak never happens could be the greatest gift of the biotracking revolution. (Location 3116)
More than 110 million medical records were breached in the United States between 2010 and 2018. (Location 3158)
The tragedy of the commons is that humans are not very good at taking personal action to solve collective problems. (Location 3167)
Humankind is far more innovative than we give it credit for. Over the past two centuries, generation after generation has witnessed the sudden appearance of new and strange technologies: steam engines, metal ships, horseless carriages, skyscrapers, planes, personal computers, the internet, flat-screen TVs, mobile devices, (Location 3395)
It should come as no surprise that we find it hard to predict what will happen when millions of people work on complex technologies that suddenly merge. (Location 3398)
Especially when you’re young, it is hard to see much of an arc to the moral universe, let alone one that bends toward justice. (Location 3422)
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” Planck wrote shortly before his death in 1947, “but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with (Location 3533)
Anyone who claims to know the answer to any of these questions is a charlatan. Anyone who says these questions aren’t important is a fool. (Location 3626)
Just by living longer, the rich are getting richer. And of course, by getting richer, they are living longer. (Location 3635)
it is easier not to see things coming than to see them, so we tend to extrapolate into the future directly from the way things are now. (Location 3790)
“The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the future,” he wrote. “… Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits.” (Location 3796)
In this way of thinking, few of the adaptations that sustain our lives are “natural.” Water delivery systems are not natural. Agriculture is not natural. Electricity is not natural. Schools and hospitals and roads and clothes are not natural. We have long since crossed all of those figurative and literal bridges. (Location 3803)
But possibility is not inevitability, for as a species we are naturally compelled to innovate in response. (Location 3827)
1950, the US labor force participation rate of women was about 33 percent; by the turn of the century, it had nearly doubled. Tens of millions of women began working during those decades; that didn’t result in tens of millions of men losing their jobs. (Location 3988)
The answer to the challenge of keeping Social Security solvent is not to force people to work longer but to allow them to do so. And (Location 3992)
2016 alone, Boston produced 1,869 start-ups and the state of Massachusetts registered more than 7,000 patents, about twice as many per capita as California. (Location 4002)
“Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future,” (Location 4084)
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” (Location 4113)
Skillbaticals, which might take the shape of a government-supported paid year off for every ten worked, might ultimately become cultural and even legal requisites, (Location 4566)
