The Immortality Games
Scientists who pride themselves on their objectivity turn out to be just as capable of enmity as those in the humanities. The longevity wars between David Sinclair and Charles Brenner have a theatrical quality, but with significantly higher stakes. After all we’re not debating political theory but our future health.
I’m reminded of an academic rivalry I once witnessed between two historians at university. The vituperation they hurled at each other was the verbal equivalent of confrontations between drug overlords, their book reviews becoming increasingly venomous as graduate students were forced to choose sides.
Repainting vs. Engine Repair
At the heart of this conflict are two competing visions of how aging works. David Sinclair believes aging resembles a computer losing its programming. His “information theory of aging” suggests our cells don’t inherently wear out—they just lose the instructions for staying young. Fix the instructions (the “epigenetic information”), and you potentially fix aging.
Sinclair’s chosen miracles are NAD+, vital coenzymes involved in energy production and DNA repair whose levels decline as we age. His approach promotes molecules like resveratrol (found in red wine) and NAD+ boosters (like NMN), claiming they activate “longevity pathways.” On this analysis, swallowing his preparations will magically smarten our synapses up so that we start to zip along with renewed energy.
Brenner thinks this is far too simplistic. He argues aging isn’t just one thing going wrong but many systems declining simultaneously. He specializes in mitochondrial function and believes mitochondrial dysfunction is the primary driver of aging. For Brenner, Sinclair’s theory is like claiming you can restore an old car just by repainting it, while ignoring that the engine, transmission, and electrical system are all wearing out in different ways.
Science vs. Commerce
Brenner’s second objection is that Sinclair is jumping ahead of the evidence. “Selling supplements before the science is settled,” Brenner remarked in one particularly cutting interview, “is putting commercial interests ahead of clinical evidence.”
It’s a reproach that Sinclair can’t easily refute because the regulations around supplements differ fundamentally from those governing pharmaceuticals. The products Sinclair promotes exist in natural foodstuffs but at higher concentrations, exempting them from the scrutiny demanded of new compounds. So far, Sinclair is using his own health regime as an open experiment—steering a careful path between laboratory findings in mice and the supplementation he subjects himself to.
But is Brenner himself squeaky clean? Not entirely. He too has his own commercial interests and is an ardent spokesman for a rival perspective. Charles Brenner is one of the key people behind Tru Niagen, one of the most successful brands of NR supplements. In fact he discovered NR as a vitamin and its pathway. Self-evidently this means that he also has an axe to grind and something to sell off the back of his own research interests!
Tricky.
Philosophies in Conflict
Behind this enmity lies something more profound than mere professional rivalry.
It’s a fundamental disagreement about how science should progress and be communicated.
Sinclair’s vision of extended life has a distinctly heroic ring to it. It’s as if he’s taken Nietzsche’s übermensch concept, dressed it in a lab coat, and given it a TED talk. “Age is just a technical problem waiting for a solution,” he seems to say, with the confident smile of a man who believes he’s found the instruction manual to the human body and discovered there’s a reset button.
When Sinclair speaks of reprogramming our cells back to their youthful state, one can almost hear the background music swelling. It’s scientific optimism with a Hollywood storyline—and perhaps most appealingly to his audience: You too can participate in this revolution; just follow this supplement regimen while we work out the more complicated bits.
Believing we can rewrite the manual for human lifespan is like believing in the tooth fairy.
Brenner, conversely, looks at human biology with the resigned wisdom of an experienced mechanic examining a vintage car. “Beautiful machine,” he seems to say, “but designed with planned obsolescence in mind.” His approach is rooted in the deflating notion that our bodies were optimized by evolution for making babies rather than running marathons at age 120. From this perspective, his strict adherence to antagonistic pleiotropy—the idea that genes helpful in youth become harmful in age—suggests our expiration date isn’t a bug but a feature of our reproductive strategy.
The quarrel between these two anti-aging experts does not end here. It goes deep into how we understand the essence of what it is to be human.. Are we, as Sinclair’s approach implies, infinitely malleable creatures who can transcend our biological origins through clever tinkering? Or are we, as Brenner believes, fundamentally constrained by evolutionary trade-offs that prioritize reproduction over prolonged existence.
A Case for Collaboration
The irony is that from the two mens’ approaches might well complement rather than contradict each other. Both NAD+ processes and mitochondrial functions are critical aspects of cellular health. The quest for extended human health might advance more rapidly if these researchers could collaborate with one another rather than tear each other apart.
A collaborative approach would acknowledge that aging is indeed complex and multi-faceted, requiring intervention at multiple levels—from epigenetic reprogramming to mitochondrial support. Their different emphases might actually represent complementary pieces of the same puzzle.
For us laypeople watching from the sidelines, we’re left wondering whether to take our resveratrol with breakfast while these experimenters with human tissue probing telomeres and mitochondria continue their academic cage match. Perhaps the secret of our future lies in other people integrating their insights rather than taking sides.
Their feud reminds us that science, for all its objective aspirations, remains a deeply human endeavour, complete with all the pettiness, ambition, and unresolved complexes that the rest of us carry to our considerably shorter graves.
