David A. Sinclair is a biologist best known for his research on the biology of lifespan extension and driving research towards treating diseases of aging. He is an Associate Professor of Pathology and Director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Sinclair obtained a Bachelors of Science (Summa Cum Laude) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and received the Australian Commonwealth Prize. In 1995, he received a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T. with Leonard Guarente before being recruited in 1999 to Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Sinclair has received several additional awards including a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Award, and a Special Fellowship from the Leukemia Society, a Ludwig Scholarship, a Harvard-Armenise Fellowship, an American Association for Aging Research Fellowship, and a Scholarship from the Ellison Medical Foundation. In 2003, one of his papers was considered a "Discovery of the Year" by Discover magazine. In 2004, he won the Genzyme Outstanding Achievement in Biomedical Science Award. In 2006 he was voted one of Australia's Top 10 scientists under 45, and co-authored the cover article of the March '06 issue of Scientific American. In 2004, Dr. Sinclair co-founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals to develop drugs that harness the body's own defenses against diseases of aging, which was featured on the cover of Fortune magazine in Jan 2007. [1]
One of Sinclair's most important discoveries was that the elucidation of the key role of rDNA circles in determining the lifespan of yeast, which at the time received much media attention. As it turned out, this rDNA circle mechanism of aging is unique to a particular strain of yeast and not observed either in other inverterates or mammals. In a more recent study by Sinclair, published in November 2006 by the journal Nature indicated that resveratrol had life-extending activity in mice fed an extremely high fat diet (60% fat). Preliminary results showed these obese mice lived considerably shorter than normally fed mice, and that obese mice treated with resveratrol lived an average of 15% longer than obese mice not treated with resveratrol. Though the question of whether normally fed mice also show lifespan extension by resveratrol remained unanswered in that study.
