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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ever since we invented fire and the wheel, we've been demonstrating both our ability and our inherent desire to fix things that we don't like about ourselves and our environment.