The Longevity Prize's Dr Kim, who has spent the last 10 years looking into the causes of ageing, believes we cannot afford not to come up with a solution. "We shouldn't just be thinking of how to treat diseases like cancer, we should be looking at how to prevent them by figuring out why old people are much more likely to get them," he says. "If you could take 80-year-olds and make them biologically more like 60-year-olds, that's a 15-fold decrease in the rate of cancer right there.