Great Throughts Treasury

"A lot of people, especially journalists, like to characterize my work and the SENS Foundation?s work as being about immortality or living forever? But actually what we?re about is stopping people from getting sick, which is a very down to earth and not terribly controversial topic."

"Ageing is, simply and clearly, the accumulation of damage in the body. That's all that ageing is."

"Anything that mainly kills the elderly, anything that young adults essentially never die of is death from aging? Which means if we look at the international classification of diseases, we can determine that something in the region of two-thirds of all deaths worldwide are from aging. That?s 30 World Trade Centers every day."

"Ever since we invented fire and the wheel, we've been demonstrating both our ability and our inherent desire to fix things that we don't like about ourselves and our environment."

"Basically, the body does have a vast amount of inbuilt anti-ageing machinery; it's just not 100% comprehensive, so it allows a small number of different types of molecular and cellular damage to happen and accumulate."

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

"I don't often meet people who want to suffer cardiovascular disease or whatever, and we get those things as a result of the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage."

"I think it's reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely."

"I don't work on longevity, I work on keeping people healthy."

"I?m not a worrier, actually. I figure I?ve got an extraordinarily privileged life. I?ve been able to go into a position of making a very substantial difference to the world?s biggest problem. As a scientist? someone who likes working on hard problems, you can?t get much better than that."

"I encounter knee-jerk resistance about the desirability of the ability of postponing aging; and this arises primarily from the way it is portrayed in the media. In the media there is a tendency to try to make everyone feel comfortable with what they are hearing and what they?re reading. The whole prospect of postponing aging doesn?t make people feel comfortable because they?re worried that it won?t be in time for them."

"I?ve always said that (tau) tangles are likely to be just as important as (amyloid) plaques in Alzheimer?s disease, and indeed that cell loss must also be addressed. Absolutely we want to remove tangles. Tangles are an unusual type of intracellular aggregate in that they are not normally eliminated by lysosomes, but they are still a target of LysoSENS because we believe that they are the visible manifestation of a ?traffic jam? caused by lysosomal dysfunction, which is itself caused by other molecules, maybe the same ones that cause atherosclerosis. (This suspicion arises from, among other things, the fact that apoE genotype is the most significant genetic contributor to risk of both Alzheimer?s disease and atherosclerosis.) At the moment we have no project in this area but we are in detailed conversations with people focused on it."

"If changing our world is playing God, it is just one more way in which God made us in His image."

"If you look at winners of the Nobel Prize in biology, you'll find a fair smattering of people who don't know how to work a pipette."

"If we look at the industrialized world, basically 90% of all deaths are caused by ageing. They are deaths from causes that affect older people and don't affect young adults. And if we look at the whole world, then the number of deaths that occur each day is roughly 150,000 and about two-thirds of them are because of ageing."

"In the eye, there is a type of junk that accumulates in the back of the retina that eventually causes us to go blind. It's called age-related macular degeneration."

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

"Metabolism involves a vastly complicated network of biochemical and cellular processes that are linked and that succeed in keeping us alive for as long as they do, but they have these side effects. The side-effects start even before we are born, they go on throughout life and they are manifested as, for example, the accumulation of various types of molecular garbage inside cells and outside cells, or simply as cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells. Gradually those changes at the molecular and cellular level accumulate and accumulate and eventually they start to get in the way of metabolism, and that's where pathology comes."

"I'm in no doubt that the hardest one to address is mutations in our chromosomes. The problem with those is that they lead to cancer, which has natural selection at its disposal - so the cleverer we get, the cleverer it gets. That's why the SENS approach to combating such mutations is so aggressive, and indeed so ambitious."

"Most scientists will get serious media exposure about twice in their entire career. And they'll get that because they've actually done an experiment that was interesting."

"My approach is to start from the straightforward principle that our body is a machine. A very complicated machine, but none the less a machine, and it can be subjected to maintenance and repair in the same way as a simple machine, like a car."

"Public enthusiasm for new advances is a key ingredient in influencing policy-makers to stimulate follow-up work with suitable funding, and it can be achieved far faster now that interested non-specialists can explore new research autonomously and can also be appealed to directly by scientists."

"SENS is based on the appreciation that there is a continuum between (a) the initially harmless, progressively accumulating damage that accumulates in the body as a side-effect of its normal operation and (b) the pathologies that emerge when the amount of that damage exceeds what the body is set up to tolerate. We want to treat (remove or obviate) the damage and thereby prevent the pathology."

"Some things tend not to work so well for science - things that rely on substantial written contributions by key experts are a case in point - but even there I tend to keep an open mind, because it may just be a case of finding the right formula."

"The aim is to postpone frailty, postpone degenerative disease, debilitation and so on and thereby shorten the period at the end of life, which is passed in a decrepit or disabled state, while extending life as a whole."

"The body does have a vast amount of inbuilt anti-ageing machinery; it's just not 100% comprehensive, so it allows a small number of different types of molecular and cellular damage to happen and accumulate. The body does try as hard as it can to fight these things but it is a losing battle. So we are not going to be able to do anything significant about ageing without hi-tech intervention ? which is what I'm working on."

"The human body is at root is a machine. It?s a really, really complicated machine. There?s no dispute about this? but as we all know the human body is a machine. (Swigs beer) Machines accumulate wear and tear. Machines have what you might think of as a warranty period. They?re built to last a certain amount of time and they probably won?t last much longer than that, other things being equal. (Shows slide of VW jeep) Here is a machine that has lasted unusually long, for a car. This is more than fifty years old. And the reason it has lasted that way is because it was built unusually well...That?s one way for a car to last longer than the ten or fifteen years your average car is likely to last...There is another way to achieve that level of longevity for a car...There are just as many fifty year old VW bugs driving around the streets of the U.S.A as there are fifty year old land rabbits. (Shows slide of VW bug) And the reason is because they?ve got style. Their owners are sufficiently in love with them that they?ve done enough maintenance on them; comprehensive enough maintenance to keep them going."

"The biggest handicap in research is an ability to think outside the box. The handicap is being encumbered by all the conventional wisdom in a given field."

"The only difference between my work and the work of the whole medical profession is that I think we're in striking distance of keeping people so healthy that at 90 they'll carry on waking up in the same physical state as they were at the age of 30, and their probability of not waking up one morning will be no higher than it was at the age of 30."

"The phrase ?natural causes? is a very strange one, really. Ultimately what it means is: they die of aging in a way that has not been given an additional name. So when someone dies of cardiovascular disease, for example, from a heart attack or a stroke, they die of aging just the same as someone who dies of natural causes. It?s just that the last stage of what they died of is given a particular name. It?s just a matter of terminology."

"The fact is, people don't want to get sick. I'm just a practical guy. I don't want to get sick and I don't want you to get sick and that's what this is all about. I don't work on longevity, I work on keeping people healthy. The only difference between my work and the work of the whole medical profession is that I think we're in striking distance of keeping people so healthy that at 90 they'll carry on waking up in the same physical state as they were at the age of 30, and their probability of not waking up one morning will be no higher than it was at the age of 30."

"The right to choose to live or to die is the most fundamental right there is; conversely, the duty to give others that opportunity to the best of our ability is the most fundamental duty there is."

"The whole point of cryopreserving only one's head is based on the idea that one can simply grow in the laboratory an entire new body, without a head, and stick it onto the cryopreserved head."

"The scientific method actually correctly uses the most direct evidence as the most reliable, because that's the way you are least likely to get led astray into dead ends and to misunderstand your data."

"There are really very important differences between the type of creativity involved in being a scientist and being a technical engineer. It means that I?m able to think in very different ways and come up with approaches to things that are different from the way a basic scientist might think."

"There is no difference between saving lives and extending lives, because in both cases we are giving people the chance of more life."

"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."

"While most of us science-literate folks are watching the biotech revolution with tentative optimism, hoping for innovations like medicines that have no side effects because they're tuned to a patient's genes, or livers and kidneys grown to order for people with organ failure, some intrepid souls are taking much larger leaps."

"What I'm after is not living to 1,000. I'm after letting people avoid death for as long as they want to."

"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."

"This is the most insidious misunderstanding of the work that I and other biomedical gerontologists do. We are NOT working to extend life for the sake of extending life. We are working to postpone the ill-health of old age, which will probably have the side-effect of extending life, but it's no more than that, a side-effect. I personally have no idea how long I want to live, and more than I have an opinion on what time I want to go to the toilet next Sunday. In both cases I know I'm going to have better information nearer the time, so it's idiotic to even think about it. However, I can tell you that I have at least 1000 years of backlog already (books to read, films to se...) - don't you? If not, why not?"

"What I actually wanted to do with my life is make a difference to the world. That led me into science very quickly."

"We've spent the last few millennia aware that senescence is horrible but knowing nevertheless that it's inevitable. We've had to find some mechanism to put it out of our minds so we can get on with our miserably short lives."

"Wikipedia was a big help for science, especially science communication, and it shows no sign of diminishing in importance."