Cynthia Kenyon Quotes

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

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

Age is the biggest risk factor for many diseases. You're 100 times more likely to get a tumor at age 65 than age 35. It makes a huge difference. It gives a whole new meaning to preventive medicine.

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

If you can slow the biological process of aging, even a minor slowdown in the rate at which we age yields improvements in virtually every condition of frailty and disability and mortality that we see at later ages.

Retarding the aging process would be therapy and enhancement because it would mean defeating diseases and because it would extend our life span.

I have little doubt that gerontologists will eventually find a way to avoid, or more likely, delay, the unpleasantries of extended life.

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.

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.

Just living longer and being sick is the worst. But the idea that you could have fewer diseases, and just have a healthy life and then turn out the lights, that's a good vision to have. And I think what we know about some of these pathways suggests that might be possible.

No one can avoid aging, but aging productively is something else.

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.

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.

The ultimate goal is to have a pill that can prevent or reverse all diseases of aging. The major diseases that I'd like to tackle are heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and cancer. I want to reduce those diseases by 10 percent.

People don't die of old age, they die of diseases that accompany old age, and they are preventable.

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.

All diseases run into one, old age.

I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.

The last thing you ever want to do is extend the period of frailty and disability and make people unhealthy for a longer time period. So lifespan extension in and of itself should not be the goal of medicine, nor should it be the goal of public health, nor should it be the goal of aging science.

When you extend life span, that's really something. That's hard to do.

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.

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 don't see any absolute biological limit on human age.

I'm the chief science officer of a foundation that works on the application of regenerative medicine to the problem of aging.