"Instead of studying the diseases of aging — Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease, diabetes — one by one, we believe it may be possible to intervene in the aging process and delay the onset of many of these diseases," says Walker, also a member of UCLA's Molecular Biology Institute. "We are not there yet, and it could, of course, take many years, but that is our goal and we think it is realistic."