I must confess I am a thousand miles away from being a DS devotee, just the opposite. And for those of you partners of the same club, this can be a video you may like:
Everyone wants to live a long and healthy life. No one wants to die. The oldest scam in history is the longevity lie. The first writing recorded on Sumerian clay tablets recounts the story of Gilgamesh’s failed quest to bring his friend back from the dead. The immutable fact of mortality has dogged human kind since its very beginning. And yet every age has brought with it its own crop of magicians, alchemists and scientists promising eternal life. Their pitch is always the same: everyone who came before them was a charlatan, but they have the secret sauce.
The most famous longevity grifter of our age is no different. If you’ve ever heard a news story that a glass of red wine might make you live longer, it was because of his groundbreaking research. Harvard geneticist David Sinclair is one of the most decorated scientists on the planet. He’s listed as an author on more than 500 papers, his work has been cited more than 96,000 times and he holds 50 patents. He was the editor of the journal Aging.
Resume aside, David Sinclair is no different than any other health grifter throughout the ages, and great fortunes have been squandered in pursuit of his “science.” In this week’s video I dive into his 25 year history of scientific mistakes, lies and fraud. I show how he used disproven research on the chemical “resveratrol” to sell a best selling book and, ultimately, a company to the pharmaceutical drug maker GlaxoSmithKlein for $720,000,000. Two years after the sale, the research was proven to not work, and Sinclair became one of the richest scientists in America. Now, ten years after that work fell apart, Sinclair is at it again selling the idea of a new immortality molecule called NMN.
This video took me three weeks to put together, but it was worth the wait.
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While I’m not fan of David Sinclair’s resveratrol research and his excess hype more generally, this video is also filled with hype and disinformation. Here are the details on the Sirtris earnings of David Sinclair:
Actually - its easy to fact check this, so I looked up the prospectus for Sirtris online. David Sinclair only owned 1.11% of the company at the time of IPO (less after the IPO dilution) - and the GSK acquisition took place sometime after the IPO, so after taxes he made a few million (after capital gains taxes), it seems.
The prospectus is here if you want to read more:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1388775/000104746907004542/a2178109z424b4.htm#ea1068_principal_stockholders
I also have the book “The Youth Pill” which is all about Sirtris. Here are a few pages of the book so people can get more of a background on what actually happened:
From this book:
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hamtaro
#4
Dr. Standford’s video on Singlair are just as ruthless. Anti-influencer videos are always popular, and they almost always have distortions/half-truths.
But what bothers me about Sinclair, is he continues to post his ‘resveratrol’ propaganda, almost daily.
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I’m sometimes a bit surprised at how much people seem to like him here. Some of his content is quite poor. Overall I’d put him as an above average wellness influencer. Here’s another example of a take that seems quite emotional/biased (in particular, taking such a strong stance as saying online prescribers of GLP-1 are participating in medical malpractice which is a very serious accusation)
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JuanDaw
#6
Some Korean researchers
and Chinese researchers
are still bullish on resveratrol.
Some Korean researchers have even developed what they call “resveratrol rice”
For the record, it is Glaxo that decided to pay $22 per share, although Sirtris was trading, then, at $12.
The stock market hasn’t been kind to Sirtris, which was trading at $12, down 45% from its 52-week high. But GlaxoSmithKline decided the market had it completely wrong, paying $22.50 a share in the buyout deal.
Forbes chatted with Patrick Vallance, head of drug discovery at GlaxoSmithKline, to find out why the drug maker decided to make such an expensive purchase of an essentially unproven medicine. Excerpts of the conversation are below.
Forbes.com: Why buy Sirtris?
Vallance: Great pathway, real opportunity for transformational medicines, the leading group in terms of their insight into those pathways, real progress in terms of the chemistry and small molecule of those enzymes. We’re very keen to have deep expertise in areas we see as transformational. For us, Sirtris looked like a great place to invest, a great group of scientists who we think are going to deliver.
You’ve said you want to keep Sirtris basically intact. How do you keep researchers from jumping to other biotechs?
We’d like to retain the entire team. We’re going to enable these people to make the medicine they really want to make. What we’re going to do is enable them to turn that from where they are now to creating a medicine to treat disease. That is even more important than the various financial measures we’ve put in place to try and retain people.
So it looks like Glaxo was trying to lock in the talent. Resveratrol seems to me, to have been a side benefit.
Resveratrol is a polyphenol so it is probably useful in some way as are 1 million other polyphenols. It’s been studied enough that we know it isn’t dangerous.
I learned of Sinclair through Attia who was completely sold on the science (I thought, anyway). I bought resveratrol and even NR based on Sinclair’s amazing insights. Oh well, this fool and his (my) money were soon parted as always.
I also found Kaeberlein through Attia so are we even…. No. I also bought 2 Oura rings, did the one true diet (Keto), and regularly did 3 day fasts because Attia was 100% certain.
I’m still pissed off. Lesson learned.
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At best it helps mitigate the damage from a high fat/keto diet.
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