The True Story of David Sinclair's Longevity Lie

what if the key to a longer healthier life was as easy to achieve as taking a simple and scientifically proven pill oh what I'm going to tell you tonight you would find extremely difficult to believe is true but one day we could be 80 but biologically 30 it sounds amazing but yeah it does kind of sound too good to be true none of these claims are sound in the experimental literature this guy took galaxo to the cleaners a few years ago the world's largest pharmaceutical company put out a scientific paper that said that all of

this science was wrong dead wrong I knew it but what would happen if after this scientist's work was roundly rejected he found another pill and amen and amen and amen and this time he was sure it would work Harvard Professor Davidson Clair got away with $720 million and is using the same strategy to do it again today now what things are you talking about that could possibly turn it back a decade or more and who do I have to blow yeah you can blow me but that would be quite a story wouldn't it the immortality

grift is as old as Humanity it goes back at least to the Epic of Gilgamesh 5,000 years ago when the hero of that tale went on a quest to bring back his best friend from the dead and then failed it has been the purview of Chinese sers gold eating Alchemist and even inspired Pon delion to search for the Fountain of Youth in Florida what do you think the Egyptians were doing with those tombs nobody wants to die people want to live forever in all that time and with all those broken promises and failed quests it

goes without saying that no one has grasped the secret to eternal life and despite that abysmal track record every single generation has launched its own breed of immortality grifters and they all claim the same thing somehow all the earlier Generations were wrong but this time things will be different because they well they have the secret sauce and in every single generation Kings and Titans of Industry sunk their vast fortunes into speculative ideas that have so far never paid off this is the story of the most recent iteration of the immortality grift and while there have

been many people offering up eternal life from uploading brains to the cloud to cryogenics the most notable longevity biologist in the last 25 years has been the Harvard geneticist David Sinclair and until a few weeks ago I didn't know much about Sinclair I was only vaguely aware about his research through news stories that proclaimed that a glass of red wine could help you live longer but I hadn't given it much more thought than that now the component of red wine that people are so excited about is Resveratrol at first glance he's a pretty credible guy

Sinclair has published five 560 scientific papers many in top tier journals according to Google Scholar his work has been cited and astonishing 96,000 times and he holds at least 50 patents as a tenured professor at Harvard it would be difficult to find someone with better credentials at all he seems like the real deal a beacon of scientific innovation and hope but then someone sent me a tip someone who said they wanted to remain Anonymous and boy howdy did I ever find a story this isn't just a deep dive into the spous health claims that I

often dig into on this channel because Sinclair well he might be one of the most successful health grifters of all time raising billions and yes billions of dollars in investment over his career based on results that he might have simply made up the story is a doozy with lots of moving parts so bear with me until the end of this video and I promise that it's all going to be worth it luckily there are lots of great YouTube videos explaining parts of this story with standouts by Dr Brad Stanfield and Caroline Sheffer of Health news

and like any good journalist I'm going to cite my sources when I refer to them specifically so here's stanfield's explanation of how this Saga all began with an innocent Peter dish full of immortal yeast The Story begins in 1999 where lab partner of Davidson cair Matt cine showed that if you overactivate an enzyme called CO2 and yeast you can cause a 30% extension in lifespan here's how Sinclair explains those same results what we found was these yeast cells as they got older after about a week all the genes started to come on and they died

now we could find genes that could actually slow that process down we could find genes that could switch off those Rogue genes and silence them and this led to a discovery of a longevity Gene called sir2 and siru stands for silent information regulator number two the ceru findings were incredibly interesting because if something could extend life in yeast and also mammals then just maybe it was fundamental to longevity in humans too if the promise holds true I think this has the chance to change Healthcare he's talking about Resveratrol a substance found in red wine that

concentrated in the form of a simple pill could significantly extend life his papers were Sensational but there were some problems what would you consider the odds that something that a fungal cell does anticipates the causes of aging and death in humans that's Dr Charles Brer I'm Charles brener I'm a metabolism scientist I work at City of Hope in California I've uh known David Sinclair since probably around 2005 or so brener has been one of several prominent critics who have raised serious questions about Sinclair's work including with high-profile reputations in peer-reviewed journals every aspect of the

ceran Aging hypothesis has fallen apart it also should be noted that brener works in the longevity space and has his own company that has similar goals to Sinclair so while everyone I've spoken to agrees that brener is a great scientist remember he is just one voice among hundreds saying pretty much the same thing about Sinclair's research as veratrol the ingredient found in dark chocolate and red wine may not have the health benefits the scientists first thought all all all the the the the work that was done by he himself as when he was a uh

a post-doctoral fellow at MIT uh none of that stuff is repeatable right even by people who were in the same lab with him Robert sfani is a professor ameritus and a cancer researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder who was also working on Therapeutics related to Resveratrol and was always frustrated by how every research Grant he applied for required him to deal with Sinclair's shoddy science because while ratol could indeed have health benefits they didn't work through the mechanisms that Sinclair said existed indeed for which Sinclair was getting rich promoted after he pushed his ideas

in magazines and on TV shows and on TED talks for more than a decade in 2008 Sinclair sold his company to the pharmaceutical giant galaxo Smith Klein for $720 million even a slight statistical Improvement in lifespans would make them billions of dollars in profit the marketing guys loved it but according to sfani they were blindsided by the potential profits and didn't listen to their scientific cohort they bought his company for almost a billion dollars so I have to know some people at galaxo all right and the inside scoop was the scientists were all against it

don't do this marketing guys won out they did it was and then they then the science were right they said none of it's right we can't we can't repeat any of it the ceru hypothesis was junk and Sinclair made out like a Bandon I asked gani how Sinclair had been able to Hoodwink the scientific Community why was his work continuing to appear in peer- reviewed journals if no one could reproduce it they roll in on I mean his his big paper which was in in 2003 was published nature it's a huge money-making operation it's not

a scientific journal it's a magazine they want flashy stuff so people can buy it so so his stuff was pretty pretty flashy his papers get accepted because people that are accepting his papers he accepts their papers right and so it becomes this old boy Network now just to pause a second I want to reflect how refreshing it is to hear a scientist with a story to career as scanes to tell it like it is like so many things in society people with power and influence are able to get their way almost irrespective of what is

right or even just I've pointed out how this same old boy network has allowed scientists like Andrew huberman and Peter AA to use their positions to alter the scientific publication process in huberman's case I even believe that he used his position at cell reports medicine to get a scientific paper onto the cover which would play well on his podcast but it had no underlying Merit cuz I don't think journals really you know have encountered this before where you have celebrity individuals people like Peter aier or hubman who have huge uh audiences you know are not

going to just run a trial or or contribute to a trial they're going to talk about that trial on their podcast that's the you know that's the purpose check out my series The Liars cheats and charlatans of the grift overse if you want to dig into these sorted details but to underscore the point this is probably the most important problem with science RIT large in the world today we want to believe that top tier peer-reviewed research is somehow immutably good that the people involved are careful and they only want to reach the truth that they

will throw out results that don't check out because objective reality is more important than personal profit and yet time and again we find that greed is always the weakest link in the process and according to scani and brener Sinclair was able to influence the publication process for his own personal profit to the tune of almost a billion dollars the thing of about old boy networks to keep in mind is that it means that Sinclair did not operate in a vacuum this isn't the story about a lone bad actor a whole network of people was involved

that's when scani said something that really made me pay attention it's the Harvard Corporation okay it's a for-profit money-making institution they getting a piece of everything he does he made millions and millions of dollars from that remember Sinclair is a tenured professor at Harvard and Harvard takes a cut of any IP that their professors take to Market even if that IP is ultimately based on a lie so while Sinclair profited the most from his grift the institution had every incentive to keep it going it's a similar phenomenon that we see where top influencers all go

on each other's podcast and promote whatever junk idea the other is promoting so long as everyone is playing the same game it doesn't really matter if it's a crooked game and if you want to go down that rabbit hole go check out this video I did on the secret of influencer success that I did a few months back after galaxo Smith Klein got taken to the cleaners you would think that his career as a professional science Faker was over no one would ever want to take his advice again when he was so obviously wrong right

well just you wait cuz it gets so much worse but just one second all right I'm going to keep this short these videos are intensely difficult to produce often pitting me and my tiny little Media Company against billion-dollar companies that want to shut me down for good like the time that ag1 hired the most expensive legal team in America to threaten me so i' take down a video that exposed its crooked founder so far it hasn't worked instead my channel has blown up going from 30,000 subscribers to almost 65,000 in just a few weeks and

this is where you come in to help me out I'm doing my best work on substack right now and if you subscribe there not only will you get my occasional newsletters but premium members will also get access to my videos before anyone else even sees them I'd love you to consider joining that gang and helping me hold truth to power so let's hit that like And subscribe subscribe button and keep this Channel Growing without further Ado back to our regular scheduled program a few years after the collapse of his Resveratrol Miracle pill Sinclair was heading

towards Rock Bottom that all of this science was wrong dead wrong it was a really depressing time of my life I had emails from Top scientists sending me condolences the clinical trials were put on on hold I thought I'd let my lab down I thought I'd let Australia down I thought I'd let the whole world down and there were days where I really just wanted to quit being a scientist and then he realized well there was another option he didn't need to quit he just had to double down so according to his tedx video he

convinced himself that his original debunked research wasn't quite all wrong but the good news was the Silver Lining was that it forced us in the lab to go back and really understand how did Ros ver trol these other synthetic drugs actually work so I pulled together a group of scientists there were about 30 of us and we set to work to understand what was true we were surprised we didn't realize that rerel and these drugs would all work the same way but they do it was amazing and so the clinical trials have started up again

and I'm hopeful that one day hopefully not in the too distant future there will be medicines that we can take say a little pill I've got an example of what it might look like we might take one of these with breakfast see that pill in his hand that's the next grift he's created a company called Telly Health who sell a supplement with rver trol mixed in wild and he's doing this entire Playbook again with a different molecule called inmn he hyped enmen up on the Joe Rogan podcast and lots of people started taking it oh

did you think that Joe Rogan was not going to show up in this video did you think that the king of grift a man who spends show after show decry the crimes of big Pharma and antivaccine nonsense and yet still managed to sell a supplement company to Unilever for an estimated $400 million would somehow not jump on the Sinclair train well to be fair you probably did see it coming but here's a bit of what that conversation sounded like I talk about in my book we think could turn the clock back by a decade or

more whoow now what things are you talking about that could possibly turn it back a decade or more well so the and who do I have to blow sorry uh yeah you can blow me but yeah you may have to do it a few times Sinclair flooded the interview with unfa checkable science sounding ideas and Rogan he ate it up even though it was clear that the science was far from settled Rogan asked Sinclair what he must have thought was a hard-hitting question you'd really have to be some sort of a guinea pig to try

to with this stuff to go back and forth from taking it and exercising not taking it yeah I'm one of those guinea pigs absent any conclusive results Sinclair declared that he was his own guinea pig and that the future was bright for the science of longevity soon his simple secret ingredient something found in all sorts of foods naturally just like Ros veratrol would start to turn back all of our biological clocks but forget Rogan for a second to get a more aidite audience Sinclair also took to the tedex stage again this time with a powerful

video of two mice running on treadmills and while Sinclair seems convinced that he knows which Mouse is the better athlete I've watched this clip about 20 times and I'm still not sure if I want to put my money on the left one or the right one one of these mice has been on the ceran activating molecule called nmn nicotinamide mononucleotides and hopefully you can guess which of these mice has been rejuvenated from an Old State these are really old mice they're almost 2 years of age and only one of them has been drinking NN in

the water and if you pick the mouse on the right you'd be wrong it's the mouse on the left obviously and we have published in the journal cell in 2018 that this is possible to rejuvenate the cardiovascular system of mice and make it younger through the cerin and we know it's working through the cerin because if we delete those genes you don't get this effect on on these on these mice here cool story Dr brener again he's claiming that he's cured Vision in mice he's claiming that he has a company that is cured cing Vision

in non-human primates he's claiming that he's reversed um functional Aging in mice and none of these um you know claims are sound in the experimental literature evidence aside can you guess what happened next in a matter of weeks domestic and foreign supplement companies opened up a new market for nmn powders and pills based on Sinclair's endorsement alone before he went on Rogan in 2019 nmn was basically unknown but within a few months it was coming to America from China by the container load according to data that I was able to collect from the website import

Yeti since 2019 the United States has received more than 2.2 million kilog that's 4.8 million pounds or 2100 tons of nmn since Sinclair's appearance on Rogan's podcast and when you consider how small a pill is that's a lot of a single enzyme I'm going to let Charles brener explain what David did was he formed a company that said we want to introduce NM as a drug it's it's a slightly weird thing to do because nmn is a natural product get his company was able to get a patent on the crystal form of nmn they call

that MIB 66 and then they start started um human clinical testing and when the FDA is notified that a company is testing something as a drug that means it can no longer be used as a supplement but because David talked about NN in his book he essentially created a demand for an NN supplement industry he told people he was taking nmn then he refused to tell them the source and so that led to a proliferation of different companies so largely it's a totally fake space where people are just basically surfing on the David Sinclair aura

that you don't have to age and that nmn is going to activate your cins and but the problem is companies those companies are not doing any safety testing and usually don't have nmn in it in fact I happen to know that they make it using eoli enzymes and so it has an eoli toxin in it yeah that's right because it was so expensive to produce many of the supplements that came to America contained eoli toxins maybe you could argue that this was just capitalism doing its capitalism thing but then well it got super weird when

Sinclair used his relationship with the FDA to affect ly Corner the nmn market he created by going on Rogan now this led the FDA to issue a letter that effectively made that supplemental nmn that all his competitors were selling illegal not because of the potential for eoli of course but because Sinclair controls the IP technically speaking only David Sinclair can sell nmn in America right now even though lots of suppliers are still getting by somehow the FDA issued some provisional rulings on the matter and the entire Market at the moment well it's in limbo until

they come up with a final ruling on whether the natural chemical in food is a drug or not well I found that a fascinating part of Sinclair's scam the more I listen to how he describes his research the more it sounds like he's becoming a parody of a mad scientist the claims are so obviously insane it's hard for me to even find the words so once again I'll just use his here's another Ted Talk where he's talking about growing many brains that are conscious to test how nmn makes them younger these are human plur potent

stem cells that are been engineered into little mini brains on the left of this image you can see these are little organoids these are quite similar to human brains they have electrical activity and on the right is the electrodes that we put the brains on we can measure that we think they dream they have thoughts it's a it's it's and we can also age them using our technology of disrupting the epome and now we've shown that if you reset the age of those little brains they get their ability to think again the electrical activity comes

back it's outrageous really it's outrageous I mean think what does he mean by he's a philosopher now right it's not really science anymore now he's a philosopher they're thinking really come on thinking I can't even express how insane this all sounds yes those mini brains are a thing that scientists really do use they're called organoids but thinking really if they are conscious then what the hell is he doing testing on them can anyone else see a problem here after almost 25 years of scientific grift the scientific Community is finally trying to take a stand against

Sinclair then David made these czy statements in the Press about they reversed um dog aging and then um many of his colleagues in a professional Society got really upset with him and said man if that's the um Academy of longevity I can't remember what it was called you know I don't want to be part of that so it was sad the Longevity Institute that stclair founded was called The Academy for health and lifespan research and it started to fall apart one of it its members Matt cabine posted on Twitter that Sinclair was a snake oil

salesman and within a matter of days Sinclair was forced to step down scads of newspaper articles including in the Wall Street Journal as well as my fellow Health misinformation Fighters here on YouTube took apart Sinclair's evidence his resignation was a crucial moment showing a major change in his professional reputation in the scientific community that he used to lead this controversy isn't just a blip it's a serious blow to public trust in scientific research particularly in the sensitive area of aging and Longevity when such claims are made without strong backing it risks not only the reputation

of the individual scientist but also the entire field there's a truth about health grifters that is almost as old as time throughout every age people have come up with the idea that it's possible to achieve immortality or at least some semblance of it with the right magic pill or protocol and while certainly humans are living longer and better now than ever before they're never has been and likely never will be a Magic Bullet but that won't stop us from reaching for one and there will always be people willing to listen to husters like Sinclair I

certainly don't think he's going to have any trouble finding new people to buy his next big idea after all when David Sinclair got his reported $7 million book advance from Simon and Schuster it wasn't just for his Mega bestseller lifespan why we age and why we don't have to because the publisher always knew there would be a second act it was after all a two-book deal his new title is in the works now now to close out here on a fantastic story according to my favorite scientist ever just because he is so colorful Bob scani

Sinclair reallyy and truly believes that his bogus research is going to one day earn him a Nobel Prize a few years ago sfani remembered how he flew to Europe to put on a lecture about his anti-cancer research on R veratrol while Sinclair lectured next door and then Sinclair discovered that there was a particularly important person on sani's panel so Sinclair jumped into action we invite a bunch of people in and we'd be all day there and at night we go out to dinner and this kind of stuff and there was a guy there one of

the speakers who was a on the Nobel committee he's a Swedish guy in the room next door to where we were Sinclair was giving a seminar there so this woman I know who's was in my department professor she was at Sinclair's talk which hadn't started yet she comes in and asks me a question while I'm sitting there in the thing she say I want to ask David would like to meet with this guy that's on the no he's lobbying for the Nobel Prize you know what I said not on my dime is it I love

that story not because it's important in and of itself but it is a call to action for any of us who want to keep these grifters in check Sometimes the best we can do to keep the scientific community on the up and up is to be sure that the scammers don't get the best prime dinner reservations and so thank you so so much for staying with me through this whole video which is rather long it's been a long ride and I can't believe how many hours that I have spent coming through videos and news reports

and tracking down people who are willing to chat with me about the demise of science as it cow toow to the desires of the market it would have been so much easier if I just had some I don't know like a pill or something that could just clear my mind of all of its distractions and bring it back to its youthful distillation abilities but alas it was never to be if you enjoyed this video I would love you to hit that like And subscribe button and consider checking out my substack where you can get early

access to all of my work before anyone else sees it and help keep this small and Scrappy journalism channel on its feet thank you so much to all of my supporters on patreon and on substack who make this work possible if you want Early Access and to get your name on the honor rooll um please check out those links down below and you know it just means the world to me that you're here from poke bear LLC in Denver Colorado this what Scott Carney investigates [Music]