Cynthia Kenyon Quotes
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It is unlikely that changes in telomeres are influencing the lifespan of the worm. That is because telomeres only shorten when cells divide. Most of the cells of the worm stop dividing when the worm becomes an adult.
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Perhaps genes did regulate the aging process. Perhaps different organisms had different life spans because a universal regulatory 'clock' was set to run at different speeds in different species.
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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.
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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.
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Generally, older people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies are running most countries and are CEOs of corporations. Which isn't to say there aren't entrepreneurs, but if the young were better in every respect, there'd be no reason for the old. Our life span reflects our particular life strategy.
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I loved the idea that biology was logical.
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If I were a worm, I would rather be the long-lived mutant than the normal worm, that's for sure.
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Ageing is very exciting. But if I didn't work on ageing, I'd want to work on the brain. There are really cool techniques you can use now. And bioinformatics. The methods you can use for comparing large data sets - that's so powerful.
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You would think that UV just causes mutations, but it doesn't; you need a gene to be active for it.
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I eat some fruit every day, but not too much and almost no processed food. I stay away from sweets, except 80 per cent chocolate.
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You could have two completely different careers if you could stay healthy to 90. How fascinating that would be.
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In principle, if you understood the mechanisms of keeping things repaired, you could keep things going indefinitely.
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The idea that ageing was subject to control was completely unexpected.
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It was like stepping on to an escalator; I could do anything. I was just made for science.
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It's like, say, if you were a dog. You notice that you're getting old, and you look at your human and you think, 'Why isn't this human getting old?'... But now we're the human looking out and imagining a different human.
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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.
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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.
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Humans live a lot longer than dogs, and we don't suffer any penalty that I can see. We're superior in almost every way - they can smell better. But really, they can't drive cars, they can't do half the things we can. I don't understand why you can't live longer and be really fit.
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There are lots of different strategies that an animal can use to survive. What a worm does is try to convert food into worms as soon as possible. In three days a single worm produces 300 progeny. So why put your resources into developing if you can make a brand-new worm in no time at all?
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Sugar is the new tobacco.
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We are trying to find drugs, small molecules, that people could take to make them disease-resistant, more youthful and healthy. Eventually we will find them.
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The hope is that if we can increase youthfulness, we can postpone age-related diseases.
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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.
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Life's too short to not be around nice people.