Age-Related Diseases Quotes

There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble.

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

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

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

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.

Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that's why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart.

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

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 my opinion, everybody is getting older and older. We have a great deal of dementia because nobody grew old enough to get it.

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 want to live to be 120. That's when I will start worrying about my age.

What makes me so certain that the natural human lifespan is far in excess of the actual one is this. Among all my autopsies (and I have performed over 1000), I have never seen a person who died of old age. In fact, I do not think that anyone has ever died of old age yet. We invariably die because one vital part has worn out too early in proportion to the rest of the body.

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

Because scientists know that all human beings do not age at the same rate, biological age is measured by how well one's physiological systems are functioning.

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.

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

Part of the American dream is to live long and die young.

Smoking ages you quicker than almost anything else.

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.

Life expectancy in America is about 79, we should be able to live to 92. Somewhere along the line, we're leaving 13 years on the table. So my quest is -- how do we get those extra 13 years? And how do we make those extra 13 years good years?

Reversal is something that has been demonstrated in a number of different animals in a number of different ways. I think that's going to translate into larger animals and humans. We won't know until we try. But we are trying 65 different genes in different combinations to see if we can reproduce the aging reversal that we've seen in small animals.

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.

I plan to live to be 120!

I think anyone who wants to live past 100 can do it.