Tag: Aubrey de Grey

I Wish Everyone Would Die

I read Technology Review’s February profile of aging research advocate Aubrey de Grey, but missed what Paul Boutlin calls their “bitchy” editorial slam of de Grey,

But what struck me is that he [de Grey] is a troll. For all de Greys vaulting ambitions, what Sherwin Nuland saw from the outside was pathetically circumscribed. In his waking life, de Grey is the ­com­puter support to a research team; he dresses like a shabby graduate student and affects Rip Van Winkles beard; he has no children; he has few interests outside the science of biogeron­tology; he drinks too much beer. Although he is only 41, the signs of decay are strongly marked on his face. His ideas are trollish, too. For even if it were possible to perturb human biology in the way de Grey wishes, we shouldnt do it. Immortality might be okay for de Grey, but an entire world of the same superagenarians thinking the same kinds of thoughts forever would be terrible.

You have to really appreciate a magazine willing to say, “I hope everyone dies.”

And what’s the deal with “he has not children”? Does not having children still relegate one to pathetic status in this enlightened age?

1,000 Years Is Not Enough (But It Is A Start)

The BBC has a speculative article by Cambridge geneticist Dr. Aubrey de Grey claiming that human life spans can be extended to 1,000 years. According to Dr. Grey,

Ageing is a physical phenomenon happening to our bodies, so at some point in the future, as medicine becomes more and more powerful, we will inevitably be able to address ageing just as effectively as we address many diseases today.

I claim that we are close to that point because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing.

. . .

So, will this happen in time for some people alive today? Probably. Since these therapies repair accumulated damage, they are applicable to people in middle age or older who have a fair amount of that damage.

I think the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.

De Grey is the chairman and CEO of The Methuselah Foundation which seeks to implement his SENS approach in mice first and offers the Methuselah Prize(s) — an X Prize-style reward for researchers involved in aging research in mice.

It offers the Longevity Prize, for researchers who produce mice that live longer (the prize is based on how much longer the new mice live compared to the old record), and the Rejuvenation Prize for successful reversal of the effects of aging in mice who have passed their mean life expectancy.

In other words, forget building a better mousetrap and focus on building a better mouse.

Of course even 1,000 years is not nearly enough, but it would be a nice start.

Source:

‘We will be able to live to 1,000’. The BBC, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, December 3, 2004.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

I’ve been meaning to post a link to Ronald Bailey’s excellent survey of life extension technologies and controversies, Forever Young for several months now. Okay, there — I finally did it.

Bailey does a nice job of covering the long-running battle between longevity optimists and pessimists, including the $500 million bet between demographer Jay Olshansky and biologist Steven Austad. The two set up a trust fund with $150 that has to pay the loser or his heirs $500 million in 2150 depending on whether or not there is anyone alive then who is at least 150 years old — Olshansky is betting against the possibility.

But as Bailey points out, demographers have a long history of making inaccurate predictions about future longevity. He cites, for example, demographer Louis Dublin’s 1928 prediction that average life expectancy in the United States would never rise above 64.75 years. Today, of course, average life expectancy exceeds that figure by almost 12 years.

The longest living person whose age can be verified, of course, was Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 at the age of 122. So assuming that’s the upper bound for life expectancy without any upcoming radical life extension therapies, Austad looks like he’s got a pretty good chance of winning his bet.

Bailey also surveys the current status of life extension research from the results of calorie restriction to vitamin supplements, hormone replacement therapy, and the possibility of nanomedical technique to repair damage to our bodies and thereby extend our lives.

And Bailey also does his usual nice job of skewering the critics who think that an average human life span of 150 years would be a bad thing. Leon Kass, who unfortunately is one of the folks the Bush administration keeps calling on for bioethical advice, believes that people who lived very long life spans or were even effectively immortal barring accidents, murder, etc. would no longer be truly human (and unlike the Extropians, he considers that a very bad thing).

I, of course, agree completely Bailey who ends his long article by writing,

“A dramatic increase in lifespan is inevitable,” Aubrey de Grey said in the British Sunday Times two years ago. “We understand aging at the molecular level sufficiently to not just imagine interventions to retard aging, but enough that we can describe them. It’s an engineering project now, not a scientific one. We just don’t know how long it will take.”

To which I say: Hurry up! The 22nd century looks too interesting to miss.

Source:

Forever Young. Ronald Bailey, Reason, August 2002.