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.

Theres nothing wrong with making the best of ones declining years, but what does annoy me is the fatalism. Now that were seriously in range of finding therapies that actually work against ageing, this apathy, of course, becomes an enormous part of the problem.

Theres no such thing as ageing gracefully. I dont meet people who want to get Alzheimers disease, or who want to get cancer or arthritis or any of the other things that afflict the elderly. Ageing is bad for you, and we better just actually accept that.

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

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

It's not just about life, of course; it's about healthy life. Getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun, whether or not dying may be fun.

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.