Mavericks of Medicine is a book of interviews conducted by David Jay Brown. This post features quotes from some of the interviews in the book. David Jay Brown’s website has many more interviews and is located at: http://mavericksofthemind.com/
Dr. Marios Kyriazis:
“I also say to people that if something doesn’t work for them then they should try something else. Don’t give up. There’s always an answer to something. There is always a treatment to our illness. Something that works for somebody else may not work for you, or the other way around. Sometimes one’s friends may experience a benefit from using a particular therapy, but that doesn’t mean that it’ll work for you too.”
Dr. Kary Mullis:
“Our brain has created quite a complex, rapidly changing world for our trusty, but blind immune system to function in. The immune system deserves some help from all those brains driving around rapidly spreading diseases. And I was thinking that my last twenty years would get easier and things would get simpler. The best laid plans of mice and men do often go astray.”
Dr. Joseph Knoll:
“We shall never forget that humans obviously cannot change natural laws, but by discovering their mechanisms of action they learn to make use of this knowledge.”
Dr. Leonard Hayflick:
“We know the cause of aging, despite it appearing to be a mystery to most people. First of all, let me tell you what aging is and then I think the cause will be implicit. In animals that reach a fixed size in adulthood, aging is the random systemic loss of molecular fidelity that after reproductive maturity accumulates to levels that eventually exceed repair, turnover, or maintenance capacity. That’s the definition. It’s the progressive loss of molecular fidelity that increases vulnerability to age-associated diseases. So that’s the answer.”
“What causes that loss of fidelity is based on the fact that complex biological molecules are kept in a state of fidelity as a result of a variety of chemical forces and various chemical bonds—van der Waals forces and other well-known bonds that keep molecules together. It is also well known that the energetics—the energy that keeps those bonds in the state that they’re in, in molecules that are functioning—do not last forever. They last for varying periods of time—from as short as nanoseconds for ATP to years for collagen—so that there’s a spectrum of energy levels in biological molecules. We have elaborate maintenance, turnover, and repair systems to keep those molecules in their correct functional state. However, after reproductive maturation molecular errors begin to accumulate and exceed repair capacity for a very simple reason. There’s no need to keep those molecules in a perfect state after reproductive maturity, because the animal possessing those molecules has already done what nature intends for it to do, and that is to reproduce.”
“When every physician in the world (of course I’m exaggerating, but I’m not too far off the mark) wakes up in the morning, they say this to themselves: The greatest risk factor for the leading causes of death – that is cardiovascular disease, stroke, and cancer – is the aging process. There’s no physician on the planet who will dispute that. So I have a very simple-minded question: Why is the funding for research on the fundamentals of the biology of aging microscopic when compared to funding for research on the leading causes of death?”
“The only reason that animals of different species live longer than others is because of the differences in the longevity determinants. That is, the characteristics of molecules at the time of reproductive maturation including the level of repair turnover and maintenance systems to operate.”
“There are four aspects of the finitude of life: longevity determination, aging, age-associated diseases, and death.”
Dr. Michael Fossel:
“The issue for me is not what causes aging, and how does the cascade work, but what can we do to intervene, to prevent age-related disease and suffering?”
“Aging may or may not be a disease, but it certainly increases your likelihood of having a disease. So the question is, where can we intervene?”
“The most promising way to look at almost any research question is to ask yourself, where are the outliers? Where are the anomalies? Where are the exceptions? To understand aging I think there’s a certain benefit from just looking at normal human aging. But I think you learn a lot more by looking at organisms that either don’t age, age slowly, age quickly, or age in a peculiar fashion.”
“I find my views of religion, metaphysics, or life after death, as remarkably personal, in a sense, as to not make them public. But given a quick answer to that, I have to say I don’t think that death is final, and leave it at that.”
“So, much as I take religions very seriously – religions plural and my own personally – I suspect that they’re a far, far distance from anything that reflects reality.”
Dr. Michael West:
“There are clearly cells in our body that don’t age, simply because they don’t divide. Heart muscle cells and neurons in the brain are two examples. It could be that they age as a consequence of other cells that are aging.”
“What I believe is the case is that much of what we call human aging is due to the damage of DNA.”
“I believe in science and in the scientific method. Despite what I notice as being a widespread distrust of traditional scientific medicine, I believe that scientific medicine is going to deliver beyond anyone’s expectations in the coming decade.”
“The analytical abilities that I now have allow me to do research at somewhere between a hundred and a thousand fold faster than I could ten years ago. This helps me to answer fundamental questions.”
“The rapidity at which we answer fundamental scientific questions today is so much faster that we wonder how we were even able answer scientific questions like this in the past.”
Dr. Aubrey de Grey:
“It was obvious to me that it was an engineering problem. Bodies are just machines. They’re very complicated, but they are just machines.”
“I realized something about how to approach the problem. This was not to approach the general concept of aging as an engineer, but actually how to break the problem down, how to subdivide it into parts that could each – with reasonable plausibility – be, not just slowed down, but actually repaired and reversed without too much risk of side-effects and things spinning out of control in ways that one couldn’t predict.”
“To solve a very complicated problem, you generally need a fairly complicated solution.”
“If you give evolution a reason to evolve the machinery to do something, it’ll do it eventually.”
“It’s not that I really want to live forever, but rather, it’s just that I don’t want to die any time soon.”
“If you live a year, and you’re still healthy, young, vibrant, and enjoying life, then you’re not going to want to die that year, and you’ll want to live another year. Then you won’t want to die that year either. So you don’t live to a thousand all in one go. You live to a thousand one year at a time.”
“Evolution doesn’t care about the life spans of individual organisms. It cares about the survival of individual genes, or genetic information, and how many organisms you have to get through per unit of time – how many generations – is irrelevant.”
“Once you understand that the legal definition of death is just a convenience, and has virtually no biological meaning, it’s easy to see that restoring someone from a state that is legally dead but biologically almost intact is not science fiction at all.”
Ray Kurzweil:
“If you’re aggressive enough about reprogramming your biochemistry—you can find the ideas that can help you to overcome your genetic dispositions, because they’re out there. They exist.”
“Our understanding of biology, and the ability to manipulate it, is becoming an information technology. We’re understanding the information processes that underlie disease processes, like atherosclerosis, and we’re gaining the tools to reprogram those processes.”
