David Andrew Sinclair Quotes

I really think people should live to be 100 years old pretty much disease-free. I think that's our genetic potential.

Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short.

I don't see any absolute biological limit on human age.

Longevity is a big deal.

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.

What makes me so certain that the natural human lifespan is far in excess of the actual one is this. Among all my autopsies (and I have performed over 1000), I have never seen a person who died of old age. In fact, I do not think that anyone has ever died of old age yet. We invariably die because one vital part has worn out too early in proportion to the rest of the body.

In the early '90s, we discovered mutations that could double the normal life span of worms.

Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.

It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.

It is, of course, quite natural that a biologist whose attention had been aroused by noticing in his own case the phenomena of precocious old age should turn to study the causes of it.

There's a whole group of people who are 100-plus and have no disease. Why?

We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date.

We know that people who are born with shorter telomeres than normal also have a shorter lifespan. We know that shorter telomeres can cause a shorter lifespan.

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.

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.

Most people think that aging is fatal and scientific data shows that that's not true.

[Anti-aging therapies will] never be perfect, but we'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of before we have any 200-year-olds, and the same for 300 and 400 and so on.

I am confident that when I get really old, the human lifespan will be extended.

With all the technology we're inventing and what they're coming up with scientifically, people are having longer lifetimes. It's scary, but in the same sense it's also very exciting.

In 1820, the average lifespan was just 26 years. Twenty-six years!

My health is the No. 1 concern and my longevity is the No. 1 concern.

We know in the field of aging that some people tend to senesce, or grow older, more rapidly than others, and some more slowly.

If a test showed you had telomere shortening, it would be a red flag suggesting you should take a look at possible risk factors.

We already live a very long time for mammals, getting three times as many heartbeats as a mouse or elephant. It never seems enough though, does it?

I think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.