I have started reading “Lifespan - Why We Age - and Why We Don’t Have To” by David A. Sinclair, PhD, with Matthew D. LaPlante 
“I have come to see aging as a disease - the most common disease - one that not only can but should be aggressively treated.”
“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.”
“What’s the upward limit? I don’t think there is one. ... We are at another point of historical inflection. What hitherto seemed magical will become real. It is a time in which humanity will redefine what is possible; a time of ending the inevitable.”
“Between 1991 and 2016, overall deaths from cancer in the United States declined by 27 percent and continue to fall. That’s a victory measured in million of lives.”
“If old habits die hard, the free-radical idea is heroin.”
“A singular reason why we age. Aging, quite simply, is a loss of information.” Analog information in the body, called epigenetic information, and what it does.
“Longevity” or “vitality genes”: “Sirtuins are enzymes that ... change the packaging of the DNA, turning genes off and on when needed. These critical epigenetic regulators sit at the very top of cellular control systems, controlling our reproduction and our DNA repair.”
“Sirtuins aren’t the only longevity genes. ... TOR, a complex of proteins that regulates growth and metabolism. ... a metabolic control enzyme known as AMPK, which evolved to respond to low energy levels.”
The level of stress that is good for you: “When hormesis happens, all is well. And, in fact, all is better than well, because the little bit of stress that occurs when the genes are activated prompts the rest of the system to hunker down, to conserve, to survive a little longer.”
“The epigenome, the collective term for the control systems and cellular structures that tell the cell which genes should be turned on and which should remain off. And this, far more than our genes, is what actually controls much of our lives.”
“Whenever epigenetic factors leave the genome to address damage, genes that should be off, switch on and vice versa. Whenever they stop on the genome, they do the same, altering the epigenome in ways that were never intended when we were born.”
“Yet even over the course of many thousands of years, their cells do not appear to have undergone any decline in function. Scientists call this “negligible senescence.””
A shark which was estimated to have lived more than 510 years:
“That’s aging. This loss of information is what leads each of us into a world of heart disease, cancer, pain, frailty, and death.”
“Because the sirtuins had been activated, the mice’s epigenomes were becoming more stable. ... There are steps we can take right now to live much longer and much healthier lives. There are things we can do to slow, stop, and even reverse aspects of aging.”
“The other test of age is the sitting-rising test (SRT). Sit on the floor, barefooted, with legs crossed. Lean forward quickly and see if you can get up in one move.”
“exposure to cigarette smoke increases the chances of developing lung cancer about fivefold. ... But consider this: though smoking increases the risk of getting cancer fivefold, being 50 years old increases your cancer risk a hundredfold. By the age of 70, it is thousandfold.”
Eat less: “Fasting - allowing our bodies to exist in a state of want, more often than most of us allow in our privileged world of plenty - is unquestionably good for our health and longevity.”
“In animal studies, the key to engaging the sirtuin program appears to be keeping things on the razor’s edge through calorie restriction - just enough food to function in healthy ways and no more. ... But it has, for obvious reasons, proven a challenge to test on humans”
“Calorie restriction hasn’t been demonstrated only to lengthen life but also to forestall cardiac disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. It’s not just a longevity plan; it’s a vitality plan.”
“Many of the centenaries in this region have spent their lives eschewing a morning meal. They generally eat their first small meal of the day around noon, then share a larger meal with their families at twilight. In this way, they typically spend 16 hours each day without eating”
“When we substitute protein with more plant protein, studies have shown, all-cause mortality falls significantly.”
“A body that is in short supply of amino acids overall, or any single amino acid for a spell, is a body under the very sort of stress that engages our survival circuits.”
“The longevity regulators AMPK, mTOR, and sirtuins are all modulated in the right direction by exercise, irrespective of caloric intake, building new blood vessels, improving heart and lung health, making people stronger, and, yes, extending telomeres.”
“Would a combination of fasting and exercise lengthen your lifespan? Absolutely. If you manage to do both these things: congratulations, you are well on your way.”
Being a bit cold: “The best way to do this might be the simplest - a brisk walk in a T-shirt on a winter day in a city such as Boston will do the trick. ... If you choose to expose yourself to the cold, moderation will be key.”
A BETTER PILL TO SWALLOW: “Among other beneficial effects, metformin inhibits cancer cell metabolism, increases mitochondrial activity, and removes misfolded proteins.”
The three main longevity pathways and the molecules that might activate them:
“As it turned out, resveratrol wasn’t very potent and wasn’t very soluble in the human gut, two attributes that most medicines need to be effective at treating diseases.”
“NMM and other vitality molecules, including metformin and rapamycin, reduce the buildup of informational noise that causes aging, thus restoring the program.”
“Compelling evidence that the clock of aging is reversible will come when well-planned double-blind human clinical studies are completed. ... It’s hard to know what I know ... and not believe that something profound is about to happen to humanity.”
“A class of pharmaceuticals called senolytics may be the zombie killers we need to fight the battle against aging on this front. ... If senolytics work, you could take a course of a medicine for a week, be rejuvenated, and come back ten years later for another course.”
“If we can use the immune system to kill cancer cells, it stands to reason that we can do that for senescent cells, too.... a few decades from now a typical vaccine schedule that currently protects babies ... might include a shot to prevent senescence when they reach middle age.”
Yamanaka factors: “Oct4, Klf4, Sox2, and c-Myc-could induce adult cells to become pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, which are immature cells that can be coaxed into becoming any other cell type... essentially showing that complete cellular age reversal was possible in petri dish”
Cellular reprogramming and “the hardest problem in biology to solve”. “If adult cells in the body, even old nerves, can be reprogrammed to regain a youthful epigenome, the information to be young cannot all be lost.”
“The future looks interesting, to say the least. If we can fix the toughest-to-fix and regenerate to toughest-to-regenerate cells in our body, there’s really no reason to suspect we cannot regrow any type of cells our bodies need.”
Precision medicine and CAR T-cell therapy “in which doctors remove immune system cells from a patient’s blood and add a gene that allows the cells to bind to proteins on the patient’s tumor ... hunting down cancer cells and killing them by using the body’s own defenses.”
“This the future. ... It won’t be long before prescribing a drug without knowing a patient’s genome will seem medieval. ... we won’t have to wait to become sick to know what treatments will work best to prevent those diseases from developing in the first place.”
“Now, when people fall ill, especially older people, they often wait to see if things just “work themselves out” before making an appointment to see a doctor.” And “The backlog could clear soon, thanks to technologies that give doctors the ability con conduct video home visits.”
“We’ve already taken some pretty big steps into the age of personal biosensors.”
“The most critical daily decisions that affect how long we live are centered around the food we eat. ... [Biometrics and analytics] will help us make better decisions about our bodies and our lifestyles.”
“Medical information can be worth ten times more than credit card numbers on the deep web.” And “I wonder how I ever made decisions about what I should be eating and how much I should be exercising before I received updates from my biosensor ring and blood biomarker reports.”
Vaccines: “researchers are starting the final sprint toward the end of a very long race to develop vaccines that will inoculate diseases that are so ubiquitous that we simply accept them as part of life.”
Organs: “In the future, when we need body parts, we might very well print them, perhaps by using our own stem cells, which will be harvested and stored for just such occasion, or even using reprogrammed cells taken from blood or mouth swab.”
“Yes, it is true that any one technology might lead to a dead end. But there is simply no way that all of them will fail.”
“LETS DO A LITTLE MATH. ... That’s 113 years, a conservative estimate of life expectancy in the future, as long as most people come along for the ride.”
“Embrace things rather than try and fight them. Work with things rather than try and run from them or prohibit them.”
“When the human brain was evolving, the only things to change in a lifetime were the seasons. 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.”
“Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits.”
The example of Boston and the wealth it produces: “Keep your population healthy and productive, and destroy all barriers to education and innovation.”
“This might be the least considered societal advantage of prolonged vitality ... humans are a lot more humane when they’ve got more time.”
“Aging is a disease. ... And not only is it a disease, but it is the mother of all diseases, the one we all suffer from.”
“Goldman’s numbers support an idea that should be common sense: that there is no cheaper way to address the health care crisis than to address aging at its core.”
“And so, with all that on the table, what do I do?”
“I don’t mind sharing what I do, albeit with some caveats:”
