50. The True Story of David Sinclair's Longevity Lie

Scott Carney Investigates

The Harvard geneticist sold a fake miracle pill to GlaxoSmithKline for $720,000,000, and now wants the world to believe that he has discovered a new immortality molecule. 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.