Quotes from Cynthia Kenyon

One thing that's likely: How you look as you age is hereditary. Some of my family members, for example, look younger than their real age. And people have mistaken me for 30, even 25.

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.

You would think that UV just causes mutations, but it doesn't; you need a gene to be active for it.

In principle, if you understood the mechanisms of keeping things repaired, you could keep things going indefinitely.

The idea that ageing was subject to control was completely unexpected.

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.

With science it's very important not to go down the wrong path, but the wrong path in science is a path you go down where everything you learn is already known. So you need to steer around the obvious.

It was like stepping on to an escalator; I could do anything. I was just made for science.

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.

I was one of those kids who was always seeking the truth, and I first looked for truth by reading novels. It took quite a long time for me to realize there are better ways.

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.