Cynthia Kenyon Quotes

Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.

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

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

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

It's possible that we could change a human gene and double our life span. I don't know if that's true, but we can't rule that out.

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

Telomerase Activation is the single most promising approach to reversing the effects of aging.

Well, we can study aging in people, but of course those studies take decades. So what we try to do is we use simpler organisms to try and understand the basic mechanisms and so in my laboratory, for example, we use things like simple baker's yeast that we use to make bread.

People talk philosophically, Oh, I don't want to live past 100.' You know, I'd like to hear them say that when they're 99.

If the aging process is controlled in a similar way in worms and humans, then we can use what we learn about worms to speed our study of higher organisms.

If I were a worm, I would rather be the long-lived mutant than the normal worm, that's for sure.

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

For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it.

Lifespan extension has never really been a goal of aging science, nor should it.

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.

Imagine that: If you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan.

The fact is that nothing in gerontology even comes close to fulfilling the promise of dramatically extended lifespan, in spite of bold claims to the contrary that by now should sound familiar.

Telomeres are the ends of our chromosomes that control how long we live. As telomeres become shorter, then cells age and die more quickly. In simple terms, as your telomeres get shorter, your life gets shorter.

The way to make a worm live longer is probably quite different from making a human live longer.

I thought that tackling aging and the mechanisms that promote life would be worth figuring out. I wanted to learn why it is that some people are healthier than others and why some people live to 110 and others only to 60 or 70.

But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.

[Anti-aging therapies will] never be perfect, but we'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of before we have any 200-year-olds, and the same for 300 and 400 and so on.

I am confident that when I get really old, the human lifespan will be extended.

The public is absolutely fascinated by aging. They don't want to get old. And you can see - read Shakespeare. Read the sonnets. They're all about aging.

There's nothing wrong with making the best of one's declining years, but what does annoy me is the fatalism. Now that we're seriously in range of finding therapies that actually work against ageing, this apathy, of course, becomes an enormous part of the problem.