A short spoken monologue by David Sinclair, PhD (recorded February 2011) describing his early motivations for studying aging, the desire to affect his generation and descendants, and his post-PhD decision to work with Lenny Guarenti in Australia using yeast as a model system to study cellular aging. Sinclair explains choosing yeast because he believed molecular progress in humans and mice had been limited and yeast offered a tractable system.
Chapters
And so the way I got involved in this actually goes back to when I was a teenager and I went into college and talking to my friends, I was dismayed at the thought that our generation may be the last one to live a normal human lifespan. And in the future, this new wave of what we were calling genetic engineering would give rise to knowledge about aging and being able to slow it down. And I was a little bit younger and more selfish in those days, but it really disturbed me that perhaps I was born just one generation too early to see this happen. So I was driven by the thought that maybe I could not just contribute to my children and their children's health, but also perhaps if I was really fast, have an impact on people like myself who are currently alive and were born in the 20th century. And so with that, I finished my PhD and just looked for someone who was doing the cutting edge research in the biology of aging. And I was very lucky have met in Australia a fellow who now still one of my closest friends, Lenny Guarenti, who at the time was just starting up work to understand why do yeast cells grow old and what we might do about it, what we might learn from these simple yeast cells. And that to me seemed like the best way to go about studying aging. Because after decades of work on humans and even mice, I thought very little progress had been made at the molecular level. And it's not because these people, like Roy Walford, weren't smart, it's just that the system is extremely complicated and in yeast we thought we could grab hold of it.
