'I can make you live to be 1,000'
(Filed: 16/02/2005)

Andy Martin meets a genetic engineer who claims to have the secret to eternal life

Aubrey de Grey's wife is 60 years old, but he promises to get her up to 1,000. And everyone else, too.

	'100,000 people die unnecessarily every day. Or 30 million a year'

"Ageing can be cured," he claims. With his long brown hair, and even longer beard, he looks like some Old Testament prophet. Dr de Grey is, in fact, a genetic engineer and director of SENS, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, at Cambridge University. But he has all the passion and conviction of the crusader: "This is a war against ageing. We have to end the slaughter."

De Grey is only 41. He tours the world spreading his gospel of immortality. But when he is back in Cambridge, where the competition among eccentric-looking individuals is intense, he is still a hard man to miss.

I bumped into him in the bar of the Eagle, where Francis Crick once strode in and announced to James Watson that he had discovered "the secret of life". De Grey reckons that we now have the secret to virtually eternal life. "Two people die every second," he points out amiably as we sink a couple of pints of some elixir of youth. "One of them from diseases that would not afflict a young person. That means that 100,000 people die unnecessarily every day. Or 30 million a year."

De Grey thinks he can save these lives. In his assessment, there are only seven fundamental kinds of cell damage that occur in ageing (generating such side effects as arthritis, diabetes, cancer). He maintains that we have – or soon will have – practical solutions for each of them.

De Grey went to Harrow and studied computer science at Cambridge. He was drawn into biology and gerontology after he met and married Adelaide, 19 years his senior, a professor of biology in San Diego. He used to work for Sinclair Research and sees medicine as a branch of engineering. You don't have to know why things go wrong, he says, you just have to be able to fix them.

De Grey has an answer for most potential drawbacks. Overpopulation? Lower the birth rate and build higher buildings or live on space stations.

Won't only rich people get the rejuvenation treatment? "Either there will be such democratic pressure that governments will be forced to deploy staggering resources and armies of personnel or the poor will start assassinating the rich."

Engineers are optimists. If you ask whether something can be done, they will invariably reply, "Yes". But you have also to ask: how much will it cost – and is it worth it? De Grey reckons he needs £1 billion over the next 10 years to produce "escape velocity": average age will be extended by a few decades to begin with, but further advances will be made, so that the potential age of a human being can be ratcheted all the way up to a thousand and beyond.

De Grey has supporters around the world, but there are sceptics in Cambridge.

"Not in my lifetime," scoffed a 50-something scientist I bumped into while working out at the gym. And Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, fears that too many oldies would suffocate the younger generation, "unless the ancients can be dispersed to twilight homes far away in space".

Over the ages, many have asserted that they have the key to immortality and the only thing they all have in common is that they are now dead. But de Grey rejects the doubters as "extrapoholics". If you only extrapolate from the past, you never get powered flight or computers.

It would be easier to believe in the holy grail of the 1,000-year old man or woman if there was some hard evidence. Which is why de Grey has devised the Methuselah Mouse competition – which will be won by the first mouse (normal maximum age, three) to achieve the grand old age of five. The same rejuvenation techniques will then be applied to humans.

The day Aubrey de Grey introduces his 60-year-old wife to the public and she looks around 20, I imagine he will find a lot of believers.

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