Aubrey de Grey

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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