Menu

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

S. Jay Olshansky Quotes

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

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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

– S. Jay Olshansky

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.

– S. Jay Olshansky

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

– S. Jay Olshansky

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

– S. Jay Olshansky

- 1
- 2