S. Jay Olshansky Age Quotations

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.