Quotes by Cynthia Kenyon

About Cynthia Kenyon:

Cynthia Jane Kenyon is an American molecular biologist and biogerontologist known for her genetic dissection of aging in a widely used model organism, the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Age is the single largest risk factor for an enormous number of diseases. So if you can essentially postpone aging, then you can have beneficial effects on a whole wide range of disease.

Cynthia Kenyon

Age is the biggest risk factor for many diseases. You're 100 times more likely to get a tumor at age 65 than age 35. It makes a huge difference. It gives a whole new meaning to preventive medicine.

Cynthia Kenyon

One thing that's likely: How you look as you age is hereditary. Some of my family members, for example, look younger than their real age. And people have mistaken me for 30, even 25.

Cynthia Kenyon

There are lots of different strategies that an animal can use to survive. What a worm does is try to convert food into worms as soon as possible. In three days a single worm produces 300 progeny. So why put your resources into developing if you can m...

Cynthia Kenyon

I eat some fruit every day, but not too much and almost no processed food. I stay away from sweets, except 80 per cent chocolate.

Cynthia Kenyon

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.

Cynthia Kenyon

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.

Cynthia Kenyon

Imagine that: If you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan.

Cynthia Kenyon

With worms you can just change genes at random and see if you can find a mutant that does what you want it to do.

Cynthia Kenyon

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

Cynthia Kenyon

Life's too short to not be around nice people.

Cynthia Kenyon

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.

Cynthia Kenyon

Generally, older people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies are running most countries and are CEOs of corporations. Which isn't to say there aren't entrepreneurs, but if the young were better in every respect, there'd be no reason for the old. ...

Cynthia Kenyon

In the early '90s, we discovered mutations that could double the normal life span of worms.

Cynthia Kenyon

I have always gotten a thrill, a kick, from learning new things.

Cynthia Kenyon

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

Cynthia Kenyon

Maybe one day we will be able to take a pill that keeps us young and healthy much longer. I believe in my heart that this will happen.

Cynthia Kenyon

It's like, say, if you were a dog. You notice that you're getting old, and you look at your human and you think, 'Why isn't this human getting old?'... But now we're the human looking out and imagining a different human.

Cynthia Kenyon

I loved the idea that biology was logical.

Cynthia Kenyon

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 geneti...

Cynthia Kenyon

Author Bio

  • NameCynthia Kenyon
  • DescriptionBiologist
  • BornFebruary 21, 1954
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionBiologist; Molecular Biologist