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As far as I'm concerned, ageing is humanity's worst problem, by some serious distance.

Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short.

Age is no barrier. It's a limitation you put on your mind.

Ageing is very rare. We only see it in humans and laboratory animals and in zoo animals and in our pets. Basically, organisms that are protected from the external world. Once you create that protection, you live long enough to see ageing.

Age is a convenient barometer of what a person is capable of, but it is only one.

The way that we are going after ageing, I think, is a problem. The modern medical model is basically designed to attack one disease at a time. Independent of all other diseases and independent of the basic process of ageing itself.

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

I think there are two aspects to ageing: there's the physical side and what's happening inside.

In one century, we've added 28 years to our average life span - a change so rapid that our brains couldn't possibly have evolved to accommodate it.

It's possible that we could change a human gene and double our life span. I don't know if that's true, but we can't rule that out.