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

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.

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.

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

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.