Now that we are in our late 20s-40s, we have more money to spend, more new skills to learn, more travels to experience and I’d like to believe that we live more freely than in our early 20s.

Of course, subtly, we are aware of getting older. Prefer going to a chill bar and go to bed at midnight rather than dancing in a club ’til 5am? Have started to spend too much money on anti-wrinkle creams? Experiencing a hangover from just a bit of red wine?

I recently listened to a Talk at Google which really intrigued me. The talk was about why we age and why we don’t have to.

I mean why DO we age?

According to David Sinclair in the talk, aging is the loss of epigenetic information that makes a cell loose “its identity” (= aging).

He uses great metaphors to explain this: Similar to digital information encoded in zeros and ones, DNA is encoded in 4 letters (ATCG) and the epigenome is the reader/writer that tells the cell what it is. Now, aging is like the scratches on a CD (remember the good old days?) and while the information is still on the medium, the reader has a hard time reading and writing on the CD. In the old days, we could wipe the CD and use some polishing, and the reader would be able to read the CD again. Can we do something similar with cells and hence revert the process of aging?

Apparenty, the answer is yes.

David and his research scientists have found groundbreaking ways to stop aging and rejuvenile cells which he demonstrates in the talk. While you can watch the talk yourself, I think the gist of it all is really that we don’t seem to be so far away anymore from the sci-fi movies we’ve watched in the 90s. It’s exhilarating!

Sure, it will still take another few decades before we find the holy grail of living forever (do we even want to?), but in the meantime, if we could already rejuvenate skin cells and cure wrinkles, that could be a good starter, don’t you think? :)

He has also published a book on that matter, which I haven’t read yet, but is definitely on my list. If you are interested in it, I have uploaded it for you here.