David Agus Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

How long you live is less important than how healthy you are along the way.

In the sixties, you're still thinking you could do something about this slow disintegration of the body.

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.

Like it or not, in the end, it's one's body. It's literally what carries you through life. There's a reason for the saying, 'If you have your health, you have everything,' and it's true. Old age, disease - these are the great equalizers.

The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life, the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician.

While advances in scientific research have led to some new and exciting treatments that have enlarged and enhanced the quality and length of human life, we must not lose sight as to what we are trying to accomplish.

If I could time travel into the future, my first port of call would be the point where medical technology is at its best because, like most people on this planet, I have this aversion to dying.

I keep dreaming of a future, a future with a long and healthy life, not lived in the shadow of cancer but in the light.

I don't work on longevity, I work on keeping people healthy.

I think that the discoveries of antibiotics and vaccines have contributed to the improvement of the quality of life, making it possible to prevent contagious diseases.

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?

Whatever I can do for the longevity of my life, I'm going to do.

Longevity is a big deal.

If you don't have your health, you don't have anything.

I don't believe medical discoveries are doing much to advance human life. As fast as we create ways to extend it we are inventing ways to shorten it.

The fact that healthier lifestyles and advances in medicine mean that we are living longer is actually something to be celebrated.

The wonderful thing about modern medicine is that so many of these complaints that used to signify old age and decline can be coped with.

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

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.

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.