The Information Theory of Aging
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In this issue: some thoughts on David Sinclair’s Information Theory of Aging.
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David Sinclair, the Harvard anti-aging researcher, has this to say about what he calls the “Information Theory of Aging”:
we become old and susceptible to diseases because our cells lose youthful information. DNA stores information digitally, a robust format, whereas the epigenome stores it in analog format, and is therefore prone to the introduction of epigenetic “noise.” An apt metaphor is a DVD player from the 1990s. The information is digital; the reader that moves around is analog. Aging is similar to the accumulation of scratches on the disc so the information can no longer be read correctly.
He continues:
In his 1948 publications about the preservation of information during data transmissions, Claude Shannon provided a valuable clue.
In an abstract sense, he proposed that information loss is simply an increase in entropy, or the uncertainty of resolving a message, and provided brilliant equations to back his ideas up….
Though it may sound like esoteric language from the 1940s, what dawned on me in 2014 is that Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” is relevant to the Information Theory of Aging.
In Shannon’s drawing, there are three different components that have analogs in biology:
The “source” of the information is the egg and sperm, from your parents.
The “transmitter” is the epigenome, transmitting analog information through space and time.
The “receiver” is your body in the future.
Quanta Magazine recently published a piece on Claude Shannon. His insight is explained:
The heart of his theory is a simple but very general model of communication: A transmitter encodes information into a signal, which is corrupted by noise and then decoded by the receiver. Despite its simplicity, Shannon’s model incorporates two key insights: isolating the information and noise sources from the communication system to be designed, and modeling both of these sources probabilistically. He imagined the information source generating one of many possible messages to communicate, each of which had a certain probability. The probabilistic noise added further randomness for the receiver to disentangle….
This single observation shifted the communication problem from the physical to the abstract, allowing Shannon to model the uncertainty using probability. This came as a total shock to the communication engineers of the day.
The thrust of the Quanta Magazine article is that the internet—the very thing via which you are reading this post or Quanta’s article—could not have been possible without Shannon’s theory. The implication is that the modern world owes a lot to Shannon.
Interestingly, if Sinclair turns out to be correct, that aging occurs due to corrupted information gumming up the inner workings of cells, and that an information theory adapted from Shannon’s theories can be used to create treatments to attenuate the ravages of aging, then Shannon’s work will prove to have been even more important than merely enabling the creation of the internet.
Shannon’s principal work, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, can be found here.