S. Jay Olshansky Time Quotations

The last thing you ever want to do is extend the period of frailty and disability and make people unhealthy for a longer time period. So lifespan extension in and of itself should not be the goal of medicine, nor should it be the goal of public health, nor should it be the goal of aging science.

The only control we have over the duration of our life is to shorten it, and we do that all the time.

Just because someone looks old doesn't mean he or she is. The skin of some people who spend a lot of time outdoors seems to age very rapidly. Someone can look 80 or 90 and only be 40 to 50.

The bodies we have are not made for extended use. We must cope with accumulated DNA damage, cell damage, muscle atrophy, bone loss, decreased muscle mass, and joints worn out from overuse during a lifetime of bipedal locomotion. It might have worked great for prehistoric humans, but it wreaks havoc on our knees and hips.

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.

Researchers have been looking for biomarkers of age for a long time and have failed. People sell tests out there to measure your biological age, and none of them work. There's no evidence that you can measure biological age with any reliability.