Lara Lewington

And the many oncologists I spoke to, and even though it's one chapter in the book, I would say I spent half the time writing the book on the cancer stuff because there were so many complexities.

And I spoke to so many different oncologists and I really came away from all of them with the exact same view that there was a transformative future coming in terms of diagnosis and treatment.

And that is quite simply a uniform aim for all of us.

So forget the wacky fringes of longevity, albeit it's interesting and funny to talk about.

But actually, if we just look at what we really want day to day, and if you talk to some 80 year olds about how they'd like to feel, then we have a far more realistic picture of what we might want.

Many of the ageing scientists I spoke to talked about this idea of how we're ageing all through our lives, from the time we are conceived, and what a difference it makes, everything we do throughout our entire lives.

And so there's different focuses at different ages.

And this is kind of the real practical look at longevity.

And the research that's going into frailty, for example, when you look at what affects a lot of older people and is very, very real, that cycle of ending up having a fall in a hospital and then, you know, you can end up really in trouble just going round in circles.

And the idea of having some protein, then doing something to stimulate some basic muscles, these things can be very tiny.

People don't necessarily know about them.

So sometimes just the importance of those minor changes, and that's something, one study that I talk about in the book that is really that simple, but it's actually tackling something that's so important that so many of us will face in our final decade or decades.

Oh, yes.

It's very easy for people to think that's what you're talking about when actually, like, no, you need to keep your body young on the inside.

This is why the field of epigenetics is so important.

It really is.

And I visited one of the blue zones in California.

I went to Loma Linda and these places on earth where people are having longer than average life expectancy.

I don't think they hold any great secrets.

What I saw was really obvious.