Quotes from Cynthia Kenyon

I loved the idea that biology was logical.

Carbohydrates, and especially refined ones like sugar, make you produce lots of extra insulin. I've been keeping my intake really low ever since I discovered this. I've cut out all starch such as potatoes, noodles, rice, bread and pasta.

Maybe one day we will be able to take a pill that keeps us young and healthy much longer. I believe in my heart that this will happen.

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.

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.

The hope is that if we can increase youthfulness, we can postpone age-related diseases.

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.

You could have two completely different careers if you could stay healthy to 90. How fascinating that would be.

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.

Life's too short to not be around nice people.

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

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.

I have always gotten a thrill, a kick, from learning new things.

Sugar is the new tobacco.

If I were a worm, I would rather be the long-lived mutant than the normal worm, that's for sure.

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.

With worms you can just change genes at random and see if you can find a mutant that does what you want it to do.

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?

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.

Just living longer and being sick is the worst. But the idea that you could have fewer diseases, and just have a healthy life and then turn out the lights, that's a good vision to have. And I think what we know about some of these pathways suggests that might be possible.

A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that's where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the genetics.

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.

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.

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.