Cynthia Kenyon Quotes

The way that we are going after ageing, I think, is a problem. The modern medical model is basically designed to attack one disease at a time. Independent of all other diseases and independent of the basic process of ageing itself.

Most people look at ageing as a disease. They do. They have prescriptions and places where you go to eradicate it.

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.

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.

The field of ageing research is full of characters. We have hucksters claiming that cures for ageing can be bought and sold; prophetic seers, their hands extended for money, warning that immortality is nigh; and would-be Nobelists working methodically in laboratories in search of a pill to slow ageing.

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.

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

I don't want to grow old gracefully. I want to put up a bit of a fight.

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

As far as I'm concerned, ageing is humanity's worst problem, by some serious distance.

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

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old.

There is no empirical evidence to suggest that ageing in humans has been modified by any means, nor is there evidence that it is even possible to measure biological age. And nothing has been demonstrated to be true when it comes to anti-ageing medicines.

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.

I'd be happy to live till 80 as long as I was comfortable and in good health. Mind you, ask me again on the eve of my 80th birthday. Even so, I hope we don't all start living to be 120. I'm not sure I'd cope with another 60 years.

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

We know in the field of aging that some people tend to senesce, or grow older, more rapidly than others, and some more slowly.

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

I plan to live to be 120!

I think there are two aspects to ageing: there's the physical side and what's happening inside.

How young can you die of old age?

I will admit I am quite obsessive about the world of anti-ageing.

Health care has not so much slowed the ageing process as much as it has slowed the dying process.