If Aubrey de Gray is right, you could live forever

I first met Aubrey de Grey over ten years ago, when he presented at a conference I attended. And his core message blew my mind. It was -- and remains -- that it should soon lie within technologys reach to eliminate the scourge of human aging. Not merely to arrest it -- but even to reverse it. We discuss all of this and more right here:

People have been making these sorts of claims from time immemorial. But they usually have a service, some goop, or a religion to sell, and Aubreys peddling none of the above. The charlatans also typically lack Aubreys professional validation -- which include a Cambridge Ph.D, any number of academic publications, and dozens of scientists pursuing his agenda with full or partial funding from the organization that he founded and runs.

Aubrey is charmingly indignant about the lack of urgency most of humanity has about ending aging. He attributes this to a mindset he calls the Pro-aging Trance, which we discuss in detail at the start of our interview. Its roots include the instinctive conviction most of us have that death and mortality are immutable realities. To which Aubrey would reply that many instinctive convictions -- such as belief in an Earth-centered universe, or the impossibility of human flight -- have gone the way of the dodo bird. And he would of course add that theres no reason for us to go that way ourselves.

Aubrey maintains that while life itself is -- for now -- unfathomably complex, as are most disease states, virtually everything that causes us to age and die stems from seven discrete categories of damage, which steadily accrue throughout our lives. And vitally, we dont need to fully understand this damage in order to fix it. So by all means, he argues, lets start fixing! He lists seven major repair vectors, which he believes can collectively end aging. We discuss two in detail in our interview, and I survey the other five in my concluding remarks.

One final note: when you hear about a research program like Aubreys, it is not unreasonable to ask, is this guy nuts? Personally, I like Aubrey, I loved his book (which we also discuss), and I sure hope hes right about everything, because I quite enjoy being alive! But I categorically lack the background necessary to assess his claims scientifically. In light of that, as well as the pro-Aubrey biases I just confessed to, I was careful to vet him as a guest with multiple scientists who are familiar with his work -- most of whom also specialize in aging and its attendant diseases.

The strong consensus from this informal advisory group is that Aubrey is the real deal. Hes viewed as being extremely smart, entirely serious, and not even slightly bonkers. Now, that doesnt mean a majority or even a large minority of scientists agree that defeating aging during the next few decades is largely a matter of adequate funding. Thats still a rather fringe viewpoint. But its a viewpoint a scientist can now espouse and retain the respect of his peers - which I doubt was the case until quite recently. No doubt Aubreys own work has had something to do with that.

Image of Aubrey de Grey by SENS Foundation/Flickr, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)