Inside the Biotech Startup That Wants to Extend Your Life

Scientist David Sinclair believes too many of us end up in old age as “the living dead.” He’s searching for drugs that can turn back the clock on aging—if regulators let him.

Illustration by Jeremy Leung

In a late January episode of his popular interview podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan asked his guest, the Harvard geneticist and human longevity specialist David Sinclair, a simple question: “Do you feel incredibly fortunate to be living in this century?”

Sinclair had spent the prior 45 minutes of the interview detailing his work discovering and testing molecules that could extend human lifespan. That’s high-level life science, and Sinclair is good at it—he runs a lab at Harvard Medical School dedicated to understanding why we age and how to reverse it. But what sets Sinclair apart from many of his colleagues—and why he found himself on Rogan’s podcast, which often features scientists and thinkers in the field of what might loosely be described as human optimization—is his willingness to test his work on himself.

“I am not going to let anyone try technology until I’ve tried it first,” Sinclair has said. Beyond eating healthily and practicing intermittent fasting, he takes daily anti-aging supplements like 0.5 grams of resveratrol mixed into homemade yogurt in the morning and metformin—a prescription drug for diabetes that also is believed to have aging-related benefits—each night.

“Thirty years ago when I started talking about this, I was considered crazy for even working in this area of biology.”

As for Rogan’s question, Sinclair said he feels fortunate “every day” to be living in this century, but added this: “I would love to live in the next century because it’s going to be even cooler.”

Statements like this have long caused many of Sinclair’s peers to believe he’s, in a word, nuts. For years, Sinclair was one of only a handful of scientists studying the aging process at the cellular level, with the goal of discovering therapies that could allow humans to live longer and healthier. Longevity research had a touch of the alchemical…