David Andrew Sinclair

We used to think that aging was a lot like, as if we were cars made fresh and youthful and then we've entered this breakdown in diet. What we didn't realize until recently is that we're much more complex than a car. We fix ourselves if we're broken.

Only 20 percent of our longevity is genetically determined. The rest is what we do, how we live our lives and increasingly the molecules that we take. It's not the loss of our DNA that causes aging, it's the problems in reading the information, the epigenetic noise.

As we get better at reversing aging it will be possible to take one medicine and within weeks feel and even look younger. Imagine going to a doctor to get a pill for diabetes, and this same medicine will prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, and will give you more vitality too.

If I'm not hungry and I'm busy, I am quite happy to skip a meal. It's informal intermittent fasting. I feel strongly that this is one of the strongest areas of longevity research.

So what we're all hoping to do, us researchers, is to develop ways to not really just extend lifespan but to keep people healthier for longer. We may just have a greater impact than a single drug because these drugs could potentially treat one disease but prevent 20 others.

I thought that tackling aging and the mechanisms that promote life would be worth figuring out. I wanted to learn why it is that some people are healthier than others and why some people live to 110 and others only to 60 or 70.