Will someone reading this article live to celebrate their 150th birthday?

Harvard genetics professor David Sinclair – a rock star in the longevity community – suspects that someone alive today will be the first person to celebrate their 150th birthday.

In an interview with the “Harvard Gazette,” Sinclair speculates that society is on the verge of dramatically longer lives.

“It’s possible to reset the age of the body up to as much as 50%. And, when you can reverse aging and not just slow it down, then all bets are off,” said Sinclair. “We now know you can reset the eye multiple times … so, if you can reset the age of the body multiple times, I think it would be dangerous to set an upper limit.”

In the Gazette Q&A, Sinclair makes clear that he believes longevity will rely on the promise of epigenetic reprogramming, the rejuvenation of a cell’s age while maintaining its differentiated state, thus enabling the cell to function as it did when it was younger.

“The older idea is that mutations drive aging and, if that’s true, the problem for age reversal is that mutations are very hard to fix. You’d need to repair trillions of them in the body to reverse aging,” he said. “Instead, we think that it’s mostly due to the loss of epigenetic rather than genetic information, which is great news because we’ve also discovered that there’s a backup copy of the epigenetic information in every cell.

“So, instead of aging being a hardware problem, similar to having an old computer, we are discovering that it’s a software problem and you can reboot the software of an old computer and make it run like it’s new again,” he said.

Sinclair, who has been involved in the creation of several companies, is currently exploring different therapies to reverse the aging process. 

“If we’re right, there is a universal cause of aging in every tissue and in seemingly every species, from yeast to humans, and diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s are manifestations,” he told the Gazette. “If we’re able to slow down or reverse the aging process, this would be a radical new way of treating these diseases.

“The same treatment for heart disease could also cure Alzheimer’s and diabetes, and make you look younger as well,” he said. “This is an exciting time. We could be witnessing a new approach to treating diseases in general.”

We absolutely agree.