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

Generally, older people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies are running most countries and are CEOs of corporations. Which isn't to say there aren't entrepreneurs, but if the young were better in every respect, there'd be no reason for the old. Our life span reflects our particular life strategy.

In principle, if you understood the mechanisms of keeping things repaired, you could keep things going indefinitely.

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

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

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.

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.