GSK paid $720 million at an 84% premium for David Sinclair’s last big idea. It was built on a red wine molecule called resveratrol. Pfizer and Amgen independently proved the core assay was an artifact of a fluorescent dye. GSK shut Sirtris down by 2013. Every dollar evaporated.

In March 2024, fellow longevity scientists forced Sinclair to resign as president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research after a company he co-founded claimed a dog supplement had reversed aging. Matt Kaeberlein, co-founder of the Dog Aging Project and one of the foremost experts in canine aging science, called the claim dishonest and publicly renounced his membership.

That same scientist just received FDA clearance for the first human trial of cellular age reversal in history. Trial ID: NCT07290244.

The thesis is simple enough to be either profound or wrong. Aging is not hardware failure. Your DNA sequence remains intact. What degrades is the epigenome, the chemical tagging system that tells each cell which genes to read. Decades of damage and repair introduce noise into those tags until cells forget what they are supposed to do. Sinclair’s lab took three of four Yamanaka factors, excluded c-Myc, the one linked to tumor formation, and delivered them to the retinal cells of blind mice. Vision returned. The study made the cover of Nature in December 2020. They then induced optic nerve stroke injuries in nonhuman primates and reported restored function. No independent lab has replicated either result.

ER-100 is the drug. Phase 1, safety-focused, not efficacy. Injected directly into the eye. Up to 12 patients, six with open-angle glaucoma and six with NAION. One patient enrolled first, then a 28-day observation window, then two more, then another 28-day wait before any dose adjustment. Results potentially by end of 2026.

The money tells you the mechanism is being taken seriously independent of the man. Altos Labs launched with $3 billion. Sam Altman backed Retro Biosciences with $180 million. New Limit closed a $130 million Series B in May 2025. Hundreds of millions more across smaller players. Life Biosciences is simply first to reach the clinic.

Here is the falsification event. If damaged optic nerves regenerate in human patients under controlled conditions, the Information Theory of Aging graduates from controversial hypothesis to therapeutic paradigm and medicine reorganizes around a single targetable root cause. If it fails, a generation of longevity hype collides with the same 90% preclinical-to-clinical attrition rate that has humbled every revolutionary claim before it.

Social media is pricing in immortality. The dosing protocol is pricing in caution measured in 28-day increments between individual patients.

One man’s credibility is shattered. His mechanism is funded at $3 billion and counting. The only thing that resolves the contradiction is data from 12 human eyes.

End of 2026. Watch the trial, not the narrative.