What I actually wanted to do with my life is make a difference to the world. That led me into science very quickly.

Celebrating the future is about celebrating a better world: a world in which everyone's life is easier and their health is maintained longer. It’ll be a life where there’s more time for leisure - for enriching each other’s lives rather than just running to stand still. In other words, more holiday time! So a holiday is absolutely the appropriate way to help us focus on it and make it a reality soon.

I dont 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.

The aim is to postpone frailty, postpone degenerative disease, debilitation and so on and thereby shorten the period at the end of life, which is passed in a decrepit or disabled state, while extending life as a whole.

I'm the chief science officer of a foundation that works on the application of regenerative medicine to the problem of aging.

My approach is to start from the straightforward principle that our body is a machine. A very complicated machine, but none the less a machine, and it can be subjected to maintenance and repair in the same way as a simple machine, like a car.

[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.