Words matter. These are the best Cynthia Kenyon Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If I were a worm, I would rather be the long-lived mutant than the normal worm, that’s for sure.
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?
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.
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.
It was like stepping on to an escalator; I could do anything. I was just made for science.
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.
I have always gotten a thrill, a kick, from learning new things.
I loved the idea that biology was logical.
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.
You could have two completely different careers if you could stay healthy to 90. How fascinating that would be.
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.
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.
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.
Sugar is the new tobacco.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
