Preston Pysh (6:37)
Yeah. So his big theory, his big breakthrough is this idea of the information theory of aging. And we've covered Claude Shannon's information theory on the show numerous times. We had the author of the book come on about Claude Shannon and just this idea of, like, how do you transmit information across, you know, a wire or through the air via signal, RF energy? And David Sinclair takes this idea of transmitting information or information loss and noise factors to biology and suggests that the reason we age is because it's a loss of information. Specifically, it's a loss of information for your epigenetics. And so when people hear some of this terminology, they're saying, well, Preston, I have no idea what you just said when you said a loss of information of your epigenetics. So what I'm going to try to do here is explain this from the ground up. And Preston, verbiage and feel free to step in if you feel like I'm stepping out way over my ski tips here. But okay, let's start here. You got your cell. And I think everybody's familiar with DNA. Okay, let me just. Let me explain it like this, because I think this is fun to frame it this way. So the typical human has about 3.3 billion base pairs in their DNA. So just think of it like genetic code. Like, you got all this software, all this code that's run, and it's 3.3 billion lines. Think of it like that. Interestingly, a tomato. Also, if you look at the DNA of a tomato, it's about 3 billion base pairs of DNA as well. So when a person hears that and they say, well, hold on a second. What do you mean? DNA of a tomato is the same, you know, length or lines of code as a human. And it just doesn't seem to make any sense. Like, how is that possible when you think of the complexity of a human. They got a brain, they got a heart, they got eyes, they can do all these things. They can communicate socially. And you're telling me that the code inside of the cell is of the same length as a tomato? Like, it just doesn't make any sense. This is where you step into the epigenetics of the DNA. So what is that? So think of the DNA as this big, long line of code, but what's actually needed inside of the code to read it and create, call it a heart cell or a neuron or the cell in your eye, these differentiations that are happening in your organs, and just all the different pieces that make up a human, how do you get those different pieces and parts out of those 3.3 billion base pairs in the DNA? And the way you do it is through what, you know, is referred to in the book as the epigenetic settings of the DNA. So just imagine, like, all of that line, all those lines of code are on a piece of paper. Let's say we had thousands and millions and millions of pieces of paper with all this genetic sequence, okay? And let's say you flip to page 50, and in order to create a heart cell, you need the genetic code on page 50. You need it on page 1 million, you need it on page whatever. And there's just very specific pages that. That's the code for making a heart cell. And then it's a whole different set of code or pages of that code that need to be read in order to create an eye cell. And the list goes on and on. For each organ, each cell type in the body, there's only Specific pages of the 3.3 billion that exist, you only need certain pages to read in order to do that. So when we say the epigenetics, what we're really saying is which pages of the 3.3 billion lines of code actually need to be turned on in order to be read? And so when you think about going back to this example between, you know, a tomato and a person having the same amount of genetic code, for all intensive purposes, the pages that are being read are the pages that are being flipped open in the book to be ready by. The transcription proteins are very specific and very different depending on what organism or person or thing is being built and constructed inside of the body. And so David Sinclair's book, so hopefully that provides a little bit of a background on, like, what epigenetic settings are. It's the pages that are open to be read. And this idea of the information theory of aging is as the cells replicate, they go through mitosis. As these cells are, you know, as you're living life, you're in year 20 versus year 40 versus year 60 of your life. As these cells have replicated the pages that are flipped open for these different things that need to continually be built and transcribed in order to create the proteins inside of the cells, that information of those epigenetic settings, which pages are flipped open, are changing very slightly. And instead of it being page 50 that was open, now it's page 50amp, page 49, which was never intended to be read, is also open. And as those transcription proteins go in there and they read that genetic code that it wasn't supposed to be reading, it's now producing and creating extra material inside of the cell. And this, this is creating noise that is not intended. And this is what's causing aging inside of anybody or any living thing. And so this is a really, like, for me, when I was reading this, I was just like, my mind was blown. I was like, this is so fascinating. It's so interesting. And it's pretty elegant, right? Like, it's pretty simple when you really kind of pull back and you think about, like, well, what would be the ramifications of this, of a heart cell that had certain settings, but now it has additional settings that are not supposed to be being read and being produced and being turned into proteins that were never intended to be turned into proteins inside of that cell, and how do you turn those off so that you can get it reset back to the initial epigenetic settings? Seb, am I out to lunch in the way that I'm describing This, or do you have anything else that can maybe help the listener piece this together? Especially the ones that have no background in biology?