Maybe one day we will be able to take a pill that keeps us young and healthy much longer. I believe in my heart that this will happen.

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.

I eat some fruit every day, but not too much and almost no processed food. I stay away from sweets, except 80 per cent chocolate.

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

The hope is that if we can increase youthfulness, we can postpone age-related diseases.

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

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.