Don't know Dr. Grey? You should.
Aubrey de Grey is not your typical scientist. With a long beard and ponytail, and dressed faded jeans and a t-shirt, he ended his talk at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference with the challenge: "If you think that I'm wrong, you'd better damn well go and find out why you think I'm wrong." Oh yeah-and he believes it's possible for human beings to live to be a thousand years old.
De Grey may not be conventional in his thinking or presentation, but he is an accomplished scientist and fascinating individual. He speaks in a quick British accent, calls the pub his "natural habitat," and received his Ph.D. from Cambridge in 2000. According to his website, SENS.org, his goal is to "expedite the development of a true cure for human aging," and like the American Academy for Anti-Aging, de Grey feels that there is a bias against this type of research. He calls it the "pro-aging trance," and challenges us as a society to move beyond it.
"Getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun," de Grey says. However, most of us expect to do just that, and react to the idea of living forever with excuses about overpopulation, social security, boredom, and the fact that aging and death is "natural."
De Grey's solution? Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), de Grey's plan to cure human aging. SENS takes an engineering rather than medical approach. The idea is to repair the damage that results in pathology, aging, and death. Rather than trying to prevent the damage (like gerontologists) or attempting to keep the damage from resulting in pathology (like geriatricians), de Grey's solution is, "let's go in and repair the damage."
De Grey says that, until now, doctors have dealt with the problems of aging by attempting to change the patient's metabolism, but "unfortunately, we don't understand metabolism very well. In fact, we have a pitifully poor understanding of metabolism."
Organizations such as the American Academy for Anti-Aging and the Methuselah Foundation are working hard to ensure that such research continues, but de Grey worries about the public perception that "aging is ghastly, but... inevitable, so, you know, we've got to find some way of putting it out of our minds." He even goes to far as to call for scientists to "evangelize" the good news that aging is not inevitable. When humans stop believing that we have to die, there will be no excuse not to fund longevity research.
De Grey says that, like aeronautics or computers, anti-aging research only needs one big breakthrough in order to keep ahead of the curve. If we can increase human lifespans by fifty years, we will have fifty years to improve that technology before the current population ran out of time. He points out that it took hundreds of years for humans to take their first flight in 1903, but the improvements since then have been staggering. Ultimately, aging would become a choice-a choice that de Grey feels we should allow future generations to make for themselves. Not laying the medical foundations for this choice, he feels, would be "immoral."
De Grey is an ambitious man. He wants to increase the human lifespan by one year every year-so by the time today's college students would normally be thinking of retiring, they won't even have reached middle age. But can he actually accomplish it? The proof is, as they say, in the pudding. It will be interesting to see what de Grey accomplishes in the next few years.