Cellular Damage Quotes

The reason we have cancer and heart disease is the same reason you can't get rid of the wear and tear on your tires on your car: as soon as you use them, you are wearing them away. You can't make eternal tires, and it's the same with the human body.

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that's why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart.

The accumulation of toxins in the body/mind system accelerates aging.

If you asked me what caused aging, I would say free radicals and molecules, which spontaneously shift and form and cause damage in all our cells and genes. The body usually repairs and replaces the damage in these genes. But as you get older, the aging clock turns down those defenses.

There are foods that accelerate aging and entropy, and others that renew and revitalise the body.

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

It's an unfortunate reality of life that toxins are constantly building up in our bodies.

Your body thinks radium is a great thing to pack into bone - where it kills some cells outright and scrambles the DNA of others, causing problems like cancer.

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.

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.

Astonishingly, in spite of decades of research, there is no agreed theory of cancer, no explanation for why, inside almost all healthy cells, there lurks a highly efficient cancer subroutine that can be activated by a variety of agents - radiation, chemicals, inflammation and infection.

We sometimes freeze the specimen with liquid nitrogen, which is extremely cold, you know. This is another technique we use now - but the specimens are not alive.

What seems to be clear to me is that after the primary infection most of the cells die indirectly, but at the later stage, when the viral load is very high, the virus kills a lot of cells directly.

Activating oxygen can produce compounds called radicals that put oxidative stress on cells. Such stress could ultimately lead to cancer and other diseases.

Ageing is very rare. We only see it in humans and laboratory animals and in zoo animals and in our pets. Basically, organisms that are protected from the external world. Once you create that protection, you live long enough to see ageing.

The possibility that lysosomes might accidentally become ruptured under certain conditions, and kill or injure their host-cells as a result, was considered right after we got our first clues to the existence of these particles.

A short telomere represents a persistent and non-repairable damage to the cells, which is able to prevent their division or regeneration.

Medicines cannot drug away the cellular defects that develop in response to improper nutrition throughout life.

Antioxidants are chemicals that break down or neutralize the damaging effects of free radicals - chemicals produced as a byproduct of normal cellular metabolism.

We are sick because our cells are sick.

Antioxidants are completely useless.

Unlike other diseases, the vulnerability to cancer lies in ourselves. We always thought of disease as exogenous, but research into cancer has turned that idea on its head - as long as we live, grow, age, there will be cancer.

The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer.

The evolutionary theory of senescence can be stated as follows: while bodies are not designed to fail, neither are they designed for extended operation.