S. Jay Olshansky Quotations

The field of ageing research is full of characters. We have hucksters claiming that cures for ageing can be bought and sold; prophetic seers, their hands extended for money, warning that immortality is nigh; and would-be Nobelists working methodically in laboratories in search of a pill to slow ageing.

We have grown accustomed to the wonders of clean water, indoor plumbing, laser surgery, genetic engineering, artificial joints, replacement body parts, and the much longer lives that accompany them. Yet we should remember that the vast majority of humans ever born died before the age of 10 from an infectious disease.

Find a way to get a full-body massage every day.

I'm not sure the least educated members of the population are missing out on the advances in medical technology as much as they are adopting harmful behavioral habits that shorten their life.

While eliminating smallpox and curtailing cholera added decades of life to vast populations, cures for the chronic diseases of old age cannot have the same effect on life expectancy. A cure for cancer would be miraculous and welcome, but it would lead to only a three-year increase in life expectancy at birth.

The Faustian trade of the 20th century was, we got 30 years of additional life, but in return we got heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's and sensory impairments. The question is: What Faustian trade are we making now, as we go after heart disease, cancer, stroke and Alzheimer's?

The evolutionary theory of senescence can be stated as follows: while bodies are not designed to fail, neither are they designed for extended operation.

A lot of people are living in a dream world - they want to deny that aging occurs or believe it doesnt have to occur. Theyll hold on to this belief until the moment they die. The reality will eventually hit them.

What we know for sure from our work and from others' is that mice have a life span of 1,000 days, dogs have 5,000 days, and we humans have 29,000 days. Recognizing that the duration is limited, and aging is inevitable, focus the attention on enhancing the quality of the days you have.

In Hollywood they're getting younger, but believe me, it's not the food. It's the plastic surgery.

Physical immortality is seductive. The ancient Hindus sought it; the Greek physician Galen from the 2nd Century A.D. and the Arabic philosopher/physician Avicenna from the 11th Century A.D. believed in it.

Someone will eventually succeed in this hunt for a longevity pill, and when they do, one of the greatest advances in the history of medicine will have been achieved.

You can open up a centenarian's brain, and you'll see some areas that look like that of a 50-year-old or of a 110-year-old. You can have variation in the basic process of aging, called senescence, in different parts of the same body.

The reason we have cancer and heart disease is the same reason you can't get rid of the wear and tear on your tires on your car: as soon as you use them, you are wearing them away. You can't make eternal tires, and it's the same with the human body.

In centenarians and supercentenarians - people over 110 - you see a higher level of fecundity much later in life.

The real problem is that there's a tendency to associate ageing with loss and decline and things that aren't desirable. But experiencing all that there is to experience in life - whether that's at the age of ten or thirty or fifty or eighty - is what life is all about.

If we do everything right, the best we can do is live out our potential with as little age-related disease and disability as possible.

Fixing obesity is going to require a change in our modern relationship with food. I'm hopeful that we begin to see a turnaround in this childhood obesity epidemic.

Exercise is roughly the only equivalent of a fountain of youth that exists today, and its free to everyone.

We know in the field of aging that some people tend to senesce, or grow older, more rapidly than others, and some more slowly.

In the developed world, we live 30 years longer, on average, than our ancestors born a century ago, but the price we pay for those added years is the rise of chronic diseases.

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.

Reducing caloric intake is the only proven method of extending life. If caloric intake is reduced to 20 percent below maintenance, you can extend your lifespan considerably.

The modern rise of Alzheimer's Disease in the twentieth century is not a sign of failure. It's a sign of success. Success in living long enough to see that disease expressed.

Older people may have always existed throughout history, but they were rare.

Death is a zero sum game for which there is no cure.

There is a possibility that there is somebody out there alive today over 122, but we'll probably never know it, because in all likelihood they come from either China or India, and they don't have reliable birth records.

The fact is that nothing in gerontology even comes close to fulfilling the promise of dramatically extended lifespan, in spite of bold claims to the contrary that by now should sound familiar.

I don't have a fear of aging or a fear of death.

I have little doubt that gerontologists will eventually find a way to avoid, or more likely, delay, the unpleasantries of extended life.

Growing new limbs, copying internal organs like a Xerox machine, exponential increases in computing power, better eyes and ears - I could read stories like this endlessly.

There is no empirical evidence to suggest that ageing in humans has been modified by any means, nor is there evidence that it is even possible to measure biological age. And nothing has been demonstrated to be true when it comes to anti-ageing medicines.

Humans will die like all living things do, but we have the added burden of knowing that we will.

Lifespan extension has never really been a goal of aging science, nor should it.

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.

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.

We're not trying to make us live forever; we're not trying to even make us live significantly longer. What we're trying to do is extend the period of healthy life.

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

When you hit your 40s, you begin to take notice of the effects of aging because people that you know begin to die of heart attacks and tumors, so we take notice of the effects of aging.

Do we really want to continue to push out the envelope of survival only to see other things crop up that we may not like?

Our concepts of aging really should be blurring because there are plenty of people who make it to older ages who aren't really any different in many ways than people who are decades younger.

People pushing the idea that everyone can live to be 100 are perpetuating a myth that goes all the way back to the Bible.

Once you avoid the things that accelerate aging like smoking, obesity, excessive alcohol consumption, and excessive sun exposure, you've done about as much as you can to influence your aging process.

As long as humans have existed, we have always desired to live longer. Every society, every religion, every culture. Of course, they all failed at dramatic life extension.

A lifetime of low calories has come naturally to the longest-lived people in the world... in the Japanese archipelago of Okinawa.

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.

As soon as a handful of scientists come up with an intervention shown to influence aging in other species, they begin selling it as an intervention for humans, even though there may not be evidence it works.

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 vast majority of studies say anti-aging supplements don't work.

Once DNA acquires the ability to persist forever, the carriers become disposable. Essentially, our bodies are designed to last long enough to reproduce.

Exercise is roughly equivalent to an oil lube and a filter for a car. You don't have to do it, but when you do, it makes the car run a lot better.

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.

In Genesis 6:3, it says man can live to be 120, but there is no scientific basis for it.

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.

If you do an autopsy on an 85-year-old who died of a stroke, you will find five other things that person was about to die from.

How long you live is less important than how healthy you are along the way.