A Day in the Life of Professor David Sinclair

If there’s a cure for ageing, it will lie with an Australian: David Sinclair, professor and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School. His day is long – and dedicated to building very long lives.

24:00

Normally I am asleep by 12 and monitor I’m getting seven hours by wearing an Oura Ring. I have the Eight Sleep bed, which controls the temperature throughout the night to get me quickly to deep sleep. But tonight I’m on a plane from Los Angeles to Boston. I work then get a couple of hours’ sleep. I love it, sitting there in a comfortable chair.

08:00

Arrive and go to the airport lounge, open my laptop and present to a few thousand people for Singularity University. I talk about the revolution happening in our ability to measure biological age and how to slow down, stop and even reverse it. I drink a few cups of coffee.

10:00

A meeting with a VIP client. Typically my clients are world leaders, athletes and leaders of industry – vigorous people in late life who don’t want to slow down. We don’t extend old age. Our science is about resetting the age of the body so that it functions like it’s young again and literally is young again. We look at somebody’s blood biomarkers and, using artificial intelligence algorithms and the world’s library of research, coach them on the best ways to bring these down to a younger-looking number. One client changed his diet, exercise and lifestyle and in three months his calculated biological age went down 13 years.

11:00

Another Zoom call. We’re building a company to measure people’s biological age with a mouth swab then automate advice. This will democratise what we do for individuals and bring the price of the bioage test down a hundredfold. We don’t think ageing is acceptable. Alzheimer’s, diabetes and heart disease aren’t really diseases; they’re manifestations of ageing. When you can reset the age of the body, these things just go away for decades until they come back again. Then you just reset the body another time.

11:30

Drive my Tesla from the airport to FedEx to send facial creams to a friend. We’ve been doing R&D for [skincare company] Caudalíe for 10 years. The Sinclair Lab at Harvard is known for discovering the genes that defend the body and the products are designed to turn on your natural defences against ageing.

13:00

Get home and give a seminar to the Young Presidents’ Organization across South America. I’m drinking water but I avoid eating until dinner or after 8pm. I’m not always successful. If I break it’s usually in the afternoon and I’ll pick up nuts or a piece of dark chocolate. Never a full meal. Our bodies respond to adversity – when we’re hot or cold, when we run, when we are hungry. These trigger our bodies to defend against the causes of ageing.

14:30

Zoom call with my investor group. I’m co-chairman of a Nasdaq-listed company and we’re looking to partner with another longevity-related company to take it public. I do my social media whenever I head to the bathroom.

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15:00

Virtual call with a magnate of industry in Canada. He’s invested in renewable energy so I will consider working with him. I only work with people who are going to be good for the planet if they stick around for longer. They also have to be passionate about their health. I look for that in hiring as well. I can teach people skills but I can’t teach them passion.

16:00

Company update for MetroBiotech, a spin-off from my Harvard lab that has pharmaceuticals in development to raise NAD+ [a coenzyme linked to cellular repair] levels. We’re seeing promising results in clinical trials. Over the past 10 years the lab’s shown that the same type of molecules reverse aspects of ageing in mice – they run twice as long on a treadmill and have better memory, better blood flow, more energy. It even looks like they live longer. This year we’ll know if some of that is true with humans.

17:00

My assistant, Susan [DeStefano], who’s been with me for 17 years, picks up some signed copies of Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To. I’m writing another book, Survival. I’ve concluded that we can’t stop innovating because we have to clean up problems created by previous generations. Today’s technology will create more problems. The treadmill we’ve been on for six million years… there’s no getting off.

19:00

During my drive to a family birthday dinner and for 15 minutes in the car park, I have a meeting with a Hollywood publicist.

20:00

I order a mushroom pizza and salad. Now that I’ve stopped eating meat, I don’t need to cut calories. I’ve also cut back on alcohol. Memory has come back to normal and I feel and look better. I haven’t ordered dessert in 12 years but I have an exception that it’s okay to steal other people’s desserts with a spoon.

22:00

I meditate with a BrainTap – a device that sits on my head and strobes LEDs in my eyes and calming music in my ears to stimulate gamma waves in the brain. Before the pandemic, I’d do cold plunges and saunas at the gym but now I have very hot showers just before I hop into my bed that cools me down. Because nothing else today was my day job as a Harvard professor, I turn out the lights, put on my blue-light-blocking glasses, dim my screen to orange and check emails. I’ll read The New York Times and scientific papers in bed in the morning but at night I like a book. Tonight I read Sex at Dawn, about the evolution of human sexual behaviour.

01:00

I use Retin-A and my Caudalíe lift serum and take L-theanine and GABA to help me get to sleep. My bed will warm up 30 minutes before I wake, my phone will go off in concert with my mattress vibrating and I’m ready to jump out of bed.