Quotes from Aubrey de Grey

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.

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

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

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

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

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

It's not just about life, of course; it's about healthy life. Getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun, whether or not dying may be fun.

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.

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.

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.

Your future self is watching you right now through your memories.

Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

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

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.

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

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

I dont 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.