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.

You could have two completely different careers if you could stay healthy to 90. How fascinating that would be.

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

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.

If I were a worm, I would rather be the long-lived mutant than the normal worm, that's for sure.

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.

I loved the idea that biology was logical.