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If you can slow the biological process of aging, even a minor slowdown in the rate at which we age yields improvements in virtually every condition of frailty and disability and mortality that we see at later ages.

Perhaps genes did regulate the aging process. Perhaps different organisms had different life spans because a universal regulatory 'clock' was set to run at different speeds in different species.

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.

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.

Aging gracefully is one thing, but trying to slow it down is another.

In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.

The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.

Retarding the aging process would be therapy and enhancement because it would mean defeating diseases and because it would extend our life span.

I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.

For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it.