“A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that's where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the genetics.”

“Age is the single largest risk factor for an enormous number of diseases. So if you can essentially postpone aging, then you can have beneficial effects on a whole wide range of disease.”

“Ageing is very exciting. But if I didn't work on ageing, I'd want to work on the brain. There are really cool techniques you can use now. And bioinformatics. The methods you can use for comparing large data sets - that's so powerful.”

“Carbohydrates, and especially refined ones like sugar, make you produce lots of extra insulin. I've been keeping my intake really low ever since I discovered this. I've cut out all starch such as potatoes, noodles, rice, bread and pasta.”

“Humans live a lot longer than dogs, and we don't suffer any penalty that I can see. We're superior in almost every way - they can smell better. But really, they can't drive cars, they can't do half the things we can. I don't understand why you can't live longer and be really fit.”

“I have always gotten a thrill, a kick, from learning new things.”

“I loved the idea that biology was logical.”

“I was a little truth seeker as a child. I wanted more than anything to understand myself and also other people.”

“I was one of those kids who was always seeking the truth, and I first looked for truth by reading novels. It took quite a long time for me to realize there are better ways.”

“If the aging process is controlled in a similar way in worms and humans, then we can use what we learn about worms to speed our study of higher organisms.”

“Imagine that: If you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan.”

“It is unlikely that changes in telomeres are influencing the lifespan of the worm. That is because telomeres only shorten when cells divide. Most of the cells of the worm stop dividing when the worm becomes an adult.”

“It was like stepping on to an escalator; I could do anything. I was just made for science.”

“It's like, say, if you were a dog. You notice that you're getting old, and you look at your human and you think, 'Why isn't this human getting old?'... But now we're the human looking out and imagining a different human.”

“It's possible that we could change a human gene and double our life span. I don't know if that's true, but we can't rule that out.”

“Just living longer and being sick is the worst. But the idea that you could have fewer diseases, and just have a healthy life and then turn out the lights, that's a good vision to have. And I think what we know about some of these pathways suggests that might be possible.”

“Life's too short to not be around nice people.”

“Maybe one day we will be able to take a pill that keeps us young and healthy much longer. I believe in my heart that this will happen.”

“One thing that's likely: How you look as you age is hereditary. Some of my family members, for example, look younger than their real age. And people have mistaken me for 30, even 25.”

“Perhaps genes did regulate the aging process. Perhaps different organisms had different life spans because a universal regulatory 'clock' was set to run at different speeds in different species.”

“Sugar is the new tobacco.”

“The hope is that if we can increase youthfulness, we can postpone age-related diseases.”

“The idea that ageing was subject to control was completely unexpected.”

“We are trying to find drugs, small molecules, that people could take to make them disease-resistant, more youthful and healthy. Eventually we will find them.”

“With science it's very important not to go down the wrong path, but the wrong path in science is a path you go down where everything you learn is already known. So you need to steer around the obvious.”

“You would think that UV just causes mutations, but it doesn't; you need a gene to be active for it.”