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Big Idea
Long-distance Living
By Mark Matousek, July & August 2007
His opponents in aging research think he’s a lunatic. But scientist Aubrey de Grey believes humans could live to 1,000—forever youthful and disease free
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Aubrey de Grey is on a crusade. The controversial British biologist, whose radical life-extension theories are turning the sluggish field of gerontology on its balding head, is determined to reinvent human aging by doing away with it altogether.
“It was bleeding obvious to me that aging was bad for you,” the Cambridge-educated de Grey tells me in his lisped, rapid-fire Anglicized tones over breakfast recently in New York City. Famously cheeky and biblically bearded, Aubrey, as he likes to be called, looks exhausted but holds forth with the kind of prophetic passion that prompts Old Testament barbs from opponents. “I’ve been outraged that gerontologists were being so mealy-mouthed,” he says, “wanting to understand aging but not doing anything about it.”
Viewing old age as an “engineering system failure” (and the phrase successful aging as a contradiction in terms), Aubrey leapfrogged the ambiguous medical questions that paralyzed his peers and went straight to fix-it solutions. “We don’t have to understand the weather to repair the roof after a storm,” he insists with the bravado that drives his critics nuts. Aubrey dubbed his seven-step strategy SENS, which stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. It consists of seven baseline causes of aging, dealing with general types of cellular damage, and offers repair methods for each. Eliminate that cellular damage and, he believes, we could live to 125 and beyond in disease-free bodies that simply do not age.
'Aging kills 100,000 people a day,' says de Grey. 'There is a moral obligation to combat disease. Aging is just the same.'
Such grandiose claims have infuriated cautious peers, who accuse Aubrey, 44, of hyperbole and disregarding the scientist’s golden rule: test your theories before spouting off. Unabashed by such criticism, this eccentric upstart continues to claim that, with the help of more money—last fall, Peter A. Thiel, cofounder of online company PayPal, pledged $3.5 million toward researching SENS—his plan will provide scientists with a fifty-fifty chance of giving “middle-aged people an extra quarter century, at least, within the next 25 years.”
He has many credible defenders, including Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who has called him “highly visionary.” Even scientists who staunchly refute SENS, such as renowned University of Illinois at Chicago scientist S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D. (who duked it out with Aubrey last year on CBS’s 60 Minutes), cannot deny the benefits of his rabble-rousing. “Ideas are the currency of science,” Olshansky says. “Aubrey is developing an important currency, which I really appreciate. He’s getting research scientists to think outside the box.”
Trained originally as a computer scientist, Aubrey learned biology from his American-born wife, Adelaide, a former University of California, San Diego, professor of genetics who is almost 20 years his senior. Stunned by what he viewed as a glaring absence of innovation in antiaging research, he spent two months immersing himself in gerontology. He emerged with an insight into mitochondrial mutations—among the most mysterious aspects of the aging riddle—published his findings in the journal BioEssays, and was off and running. Aubrey received a doctorate for his gerontology research from Cambridge in 2000.
“Aging kills 100,000 people a day,” Aubrey reminds me, pouring his third cup of coffee. “There is a moral obligation to combat cancer, diabetes, and other diseases. Aging is just the same.”
Or is it? Comparing the inevitable to “avoidable” diseases causes some cognitive dissonance. Yet this is exactly where our paradigm needs to shift, he believes. “If there’s nothing we can do about aging, it’s natural to put it out of one’s mind and get on with one’s miserably short life.” But if aging turns out to be as treatable as Aubrey predicts, the “natural” argument goes down the drain.
“What would be unnatural,” he says, “would be to put up with suffering when we know we needn’t.”
Aubrey and his critics agree on one thing: that funds and political clout devoted to treatments for aging have been woefully insufficient. Last year The Scientist published an article in which four of the field’s brightest lights (including Olshansky) sounded the clarion call that “a concerted effort to slow aging begin immediately.” Their recommendation? That the National Institutes of Health, which in 2006 allotted a scrawny 0.1 percent of its $28 billion in funding to aging-related medicine, up the annual antiaging budget to around $3 billion.
Recent breakthroughs seem to warrant such spending. First, there are the so-called supercentenarians, individuals who live to be 100-plus, whose DNA can be more closely studied. There are natural substances, such as resveratrol (abundant in red wine), that might help us untangle the “French paradox” of why our chic Parisian friends rarely gain a visible ounce despite all those baguettes and Brie. And biogerontologists seem well on their way to discovering the “aging gene,” which could soon enable scientists to flip off cellular aging switches. Scientists have already extended the longevity of lab mice by 40 percent by dramatically cutting their calories.
In humans this would mean an average life expectancy of 112; Aubrey believes “humans might live to 1,000.” Noted German gerontologist Graham Pawelek is of a similar mind. “In the next ten to 20 years science will have advanced sufficiently to allow people to live, say, 150 or 200 years,” he recently boasted to The Chronicle of Higher Education. “My mainstream colleagues will be saying ‘Aubrey was right.’”
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Such answered prayers could be a mixed blessing. A 20-year increase in life span between now and 2030 would mean twice as many U.S. retirees relative to working people. The retirement age would climb to 85. But Pulitzer Prizewinning gerontologist Robert Butler, M.D., head of the International Longevity Center in New York City, cautions, “We’re nowhere near any kind of a breakthrough.” He mentions the well-known fact that Aubrey has never worked in a laboratory setting. “I have spent my life in the lab,” Butler says, chuckling. “You learn how hard nature is at giving away its secrets.”
As University of Michigan biologist Richard Miller, M.D., Ph.D., put it in a letter published last year, learning to do what Aubrey claims possible is a good idea. But Miller would like him to solve another complex problem: how to make pigs fly.
What I want to know is this: who the hell would want to live that long? Aubrey has no idea. “But it is diabolical to deny people their right to life.” Yale surgery professor Sherwin Nuland, M.D., writing in Technology Review, worries that Aubrey’s plan would “destroy us in attempting to preserve us” by undermining “what it means to be human.” Is Nuland suggesting that I wrinkle, therefore I am? Would life lose its meaning without the sagging and the excess nose hair?
Aubrey is not a godless man: “I’m a happy agnostic—and I am doing the work of the Scriptures,” he adds, as if responding to those who accuse him of playing God. Yet there seems to be more than a dash of messianic zeal when he says he’s doing “more about suffering than almost anybody on the planet.” (He has also founded the Methuselah Mouse Prize, to encourage longevity research on mice.)
We must act quickly, Aubrey believes. “Do it for your grandchildren,” he says. With his long beard, he seems almost like a spiritual figure hoping to “save the world if I could.” Or at least put Botox out of business.
Frequent contributor Mark Matousek has no interest in living past 110.
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