Anti-ageing sage David Sinclair among world’s most influential

BIOCHEMISTS are seldom mentioned in the same sentence as Beyoncé. David Sinclair has achieved that feat.

Supplied Editorial FW: Time's 100 most influential -- David Sinclair

IT’S not often that a medical ­researcher gets mentioned in the same sentence as Beyonce. Last week, David Sinclair achieved that feat when he made Time’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Professor Sinclair, whose work on the anti-ageing compound resveratrol means he gets to tell people to drink red wine, also joined the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Robert Redford, Serena Williams and Edward Snowden.

Time said that the Sydney-­educated geneticist’s pursuit of youth had started humbly. “He identified genes that allow yeast to get by on fewer calories and ­extend their life span by about 30 per cent. Nice for yeast — not for hungry humans.”

But Sinclair told a Sydney audience last year that yeast had just been a first step. “I figured if we couldn’t understand what makes yeast cells age, we’d have no hope of working out why ­(humans) age,” he said.

Last year, Sinclair lifted his game, Time eulogised. “(He) pinned down a chemical known as NAD that actually reverses the ageing process in cells.

“NAD levels tend to drop by as much as 50 per cent as we get older.

“If we could restore what’s lost, ageing cells might behave as if they were younger. Immortality is out of reach, but living more years with a body that’s robust enough to make the most of them is a real possibility.”

The Harvard-based Sinclair also maintains a lab at the University of NSW. The university says another landmark publication this year has settled a decade of controversy around resveratrol.

In 2003, Sinclair linked the molecule, which is found in red wine, with an anti-ageing enzyme called SIRT1. In 2006, he made a splash with research findings that mice given a resveratrol-based drug could survive a Western diet, living longer and staving off age-related diseases. A 2010 study claimed the science was flawed and the drugs didn’t work. But the new paper upholds the accuracy of the original research and explains how the drugs work, UNSW says. It says youthful-looking Sinclair, 44, who has been taking resveratrol for seven years, is one of the drug’s best advertisements.