The way doctors treat illness today "is simple," wrote S. Jay Olshansky, a demographer at the University of Illinois. "As soon as a disease appears, … - David A. Sinclair

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn noted that scientific discovery is never complete; it goes through predictable stages of evolution. When a theory succeeds at explaining previously unexplainable observations about the world, it becomes a tool that scientists can use to discover even more.

the Royal Society. Founded in the 1600s during the Age of Enlightenment and formerly headed by Australia's catalyst, the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, as well as such legendary minds as Sir Isaac Newton and Thomas Henry Huxley, the society's cheeky motto is a pretty good one to live by: "Nullius in Verba," it says underneath the society's coat of arms. That's Latin for "Take nobody's word for it."

In animal studies, the key to engaging the sirtuin program appears to be keeping things on the razor's edge through calorie restriction — just enough food to function in healthy ways and no more. This makes sense. It engages the survival circuit, telling longevity genes to do what they have been doing since primordial times: boost cellular defenses, keep organisms alive during times of adversity, ward off disease and deterioration, minimize epigenetic change, and slow down aging.