Aging Research Quotes

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

If I could only live another century!

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

Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.

Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact

Time is the most important thing to me - how can you do all the things you want to do with such limited time… I'm hoping science of life extension makes progress.

Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die. But we don't have a technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems; the point is to prioritize solutions to problems.

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.

People have to change their concepts of aging and I am not asking them to do so based on some fanciful notion, but on scientific fact.

Most of the centenarians whom I have been able to see have been so defective mentally that all that can be studied in them are the physical qualities and functions.

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.

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

We are slowly isolating the genes involved with the aging process. We do not have the fountain of youth, but I think, in the coming decades, we will unravel the aging process at the genetic level.

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.

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.

In the early '90s, we discovered mutations that could double the normal life span of worms.

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.

As soon as a handful of scientists come up with an intervention shown to influence aging in other species, they begin selling it as an intervention for humans, even though there may not be evidence it works.

Aging is not currently regarded as a disease, but researchers tend increasingly to view it as the common origin of conditions like insulin resistance or cardiovascular disease, whose incidence rises with age. In treating cell aging, we could prevent these diseases.

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.