Only 20 percent of our longevity is genetically determined. The rest is what we do, how we live our lives and increasingly the molecules that we take. It's not the loss of our DNA that causes aging, it's the problems in reading the information, the epigenetic noise.
Unfortunately, because aging is so common and natural, we tend to think of it as destiny or something we should accept.
The ultimate goal is to have a pill that can prevent or reverse all diseases of aging. The major diseases that I'd like to tackle are heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and cancer. I want to reduce those diseases by 10 percent.
I thought that tackling aging and the mechanisms that promote life would be worth figuring out. I wanted to learn why it is that some people are healthier than others and why some people live to 110 and others only to 60 or 70.
So aging is really just the way we deteriorate over time. Lifespan on the other hand is how long we live. We typically refer to that as longevity.
You want to shock the body and not be constant. Intermittent fasting is an increasingly popular way: Skip breakfast, for example. Also lifting weights, losing your breath from exercise and alternating between hot and cold temperatures. We think these measures will only get us to 100 to 122 years old. That's our natural lifespan.
I actually think it will be possible one day to be immortal.
Aging is just like any deterioration of the body. It fulfills every category of what we call a disease except one: it impacts more than half the population.
The mice that had the resveratrol in their diet were still obese, but they were seemingly or relatively immune to the effects of the obesity. So their arteries were clear, their liver was nice and thin. Their bones were stronger. They could run further.
When I started in the field, aging research was the backwater of biology. The idea that you could find a molecule that would prevent many diseases at once was considered impossible.
I believe in my work and advocate for my conclusions.
As we get better at reversing aging it will be possible to take one medicine and within weeks feel and even look younger. Imagine going to a doctor to get a pill for diabetes, and this same medicine will prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, and will give you more vitality too.
Well, we can study aging in people, but of course those studies take decades. So what we try to do is we use simpler organisms to try and understand the basic mechanisms and so in my laboratory, for example, we use things like simple baker's yeast that we use to make bread.
The way to make a worm live longer is probably quite different from making a human live longer.
I tried calorie restriction and couldn't do it. It's really hard to be hungry all the time.
Resveratrol does not act primarily as an antioxidant. It is far more interesting and powerful than that. Resveratrol turns on our body's genetic defenses against diseases and aging itself.
We can change our lives for the better, and always have. We used to think pain during surgery and dying during childbirth were inevitable. We no longer accept that, and we shouldn't just accept aging.
Scientists don't like to be called salesmen.
I'm driven to get to goals as fast as possible. It frustrates people in my lab who have something they think is cool, but if it doesn't move us forward, I don't want to do it.
My grandmother is the black-sheep rebel of the family.
