S. Jay Olshansky Quotes

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

The idea that ageing was subject to control was completely unexpected.

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

One characteristic aspect of ageing is the increased susceptibility to disease, particularly age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

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.

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.

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.

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

How young can you die of old age?

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

Unfortunately, because aging is so common and natural, we tend to think of it as destiny or something we should accept.

When I started in the field, aging research was the backwater of biology. The idea that you could find a molecule that would prevent many diseases at once was considered impossible.

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

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

Nature is a numbers game. We need all the support we can get as our immune systems and health are under assault from pollution, stress, contaminated food and age-related diseases as our lifespans increase.

There's no such thing as ageing gracefully. I don't meet people who want to get Alzheimer's disease, or who want to get cancer or arthritis or any of the other things that afflict the elderly. Ageing is bad for you, and we better just actually accept that.

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

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.

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.

In an ideal world, the amount of money we spend on medical research to prevent or cure a disease would be proportional to its seriousness and the number of people who suffer from it.