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.

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

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.

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.

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.