Cynthia Kenyon Quotes

Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.

Age is the single largest risk factor for an enormous number of diseases. So if you can essentially postpone aging, then you can have beneficial effects on a whole wide range of disease.

All diseases run into one, old age.

With some diseases, like type 2 diabetes, if people get alerted early, they can take steps to avert getting sick.

The only difference between my work and the work of the whole medical profession is that I think we're in striking distance of keeping people so healthy that at 90 they'll carry on waking up in the same physical state as they were at the age of 30, and their probability of not waking up one morning will be no higher than it was at the age of 30.

If we do everything right, the best we can do is live out our potential with as little age-related disease and disability as possible.

I want to live to be 120. That's when I will start worrying about my age.

No one can control the aging process or the trajectory of illness.

If there is a race, it is one to bring the benefits of genomes to human therapeutics. We all want to get there. We all want people to have much more meaningful and productive lives as they age.

I really think people should live to be 100 years old pretty much disease-free. I think that's our genetic potential.

The aim is to postpone frailty, postpone degenerative disease, debilitation and so on and thereby shorten the period at the end of life, which is passed in a decrepit or disabled state, while extending life as a whole.

We have forgotten that curing cancer starts with preventing cancer in the first place.

The hope is that if we can increase youthfulness, we can postpone age-related diseases.

Cancer is the ultimate nemesis that hangs in the balance for one in three women and one in two men in their lifetime.

Children born today have a fifty-fifty chance of living to 100.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.

While eliminating smallpox and curtailing cholera added decades of life to vast populations, cures for the chronic diseases of old age cannot have the same effect on life expectancy. A cure for cancer would be miraculous and welcome, but it would lead to only a three-year increase in life expectancy at birth.

We are paying the price for living longer, collecting degenerative diseases along the way. Cancer is only one. Others are heart and brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinsons.

Progress of preventive medicine as a preservative, made more effective by the progress of reason and social order, will eventually banish communicable or contagious illnesses and those diseases in general that originate in climate, food, and the nature of work…a time will come when death would result only from extraordinary accidents or the more and more gradual wearing out of vitality….Cannot the span constantly increase between the moment he begins to live and the time when naturally, without illness or accident, he finds life a burden?

We care a lot more about not having the disease than treating it.

I just want to live a long healthy life, and I don't want to have any neurological diseases or die younger than I would otherwise.

As we get better at reversing aging it will be possible to take one medicine and within weeks feel and even look younger. Imagine going to a doctor to get a pill for diabetes, and this same medicine will prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, and will give you more vitality too.

The goal of getting your genome done is not to tell you what you will die from, but it's how to learn how to take action to prevent disease.

Longevity is a big deal.

So what we're all hoping to do, us researchers, is to develop ways to not really just extend lifespan but to keep people healthier for longer. We may just have a greater impact than a single drug because these drugs could potentially treat one disease but prevent 20 others.