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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.