High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Thomas Burton Loram Kirkwood CBE (born 1951, Durban, South Africa) is an English biologist who made his contribution to the biology of ageing by proposing the concept of Disposable soma. He is currently a researcher in Newcastle University and heads The Institute for Ageing and Health in its School of Clinical Medical Sciences. He is the author of Time of Our Lives: The Science of Human Aging (1999) and The End of Age: Why Everything About Aging Is Changing (2001), and co-author of Chance, Development, and Aging (2000, together with Caleb E. Finch).