Aubrey de Grey is a man on a mission. The co-founder and Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation, a California-based research centre and non-for-profit charity that’s transforming the way the world researches and treats age-related diseases, is set to ‘cure’ ageing. “The fact is, ageing kills 110,000 people worldwide every fucking day,” says de Grey in his signature casual tone at a Virtual Futures event in London. “[Ageing] doesn’t just kill them. You have to take into account all the suffering that comes before.”

De Grey isn’t the only one working on ways to ensure we live longer and healthier lives. Just last year, researchers from the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, published a research paper about a molecule that elongates healthspan – the length of time for which a living thing remains healthy. More recently, another team from the University of Exeter in the UK used resveratrol analogues – the chemicals based on a substance naturally found in red wine, dark chocolate and berries – to develop a breakthrough method that reverses ageing. “When I saw some of the cells in the culture dish rejuvenating I couldn’t believe it,” says Dr Eva Latorre, a research associate at the University. “These old cells were looking like young cells. It was like magic.”

Sitting alongside all this biological research is Elon Musk’s Neuralink – a brain-computer interface venture set to help mankind keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence. True to form, Musk has forgone looking for the key to anti-ageing and is instead making plans for the next wave of human evolution to be (bio)technological. If you’re a fan of ’80s and ’90s futuristic movies then biotechnological evolution won’t be such a novel concept. From Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca to Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, sci-fi diehards have been hearing about the fictional world of cyborg and biologically-enhanced generations for years.

The move from fiction to reality and the world’s collective journey towards this biologically enhanced cyborg hybrid, also known as transhumanism, started in the 1920s when several teams of researchers became interested in the effect of X-rays on mammals’ life-cycle and reproduction. By 1927, a New Yorker named Hermann Joseph Muller published a paper in the journal Science called ‘Artificial Transmutation of the Gene’, explaining how genetic mutations can be induced by X-rays and are hereditary.

Skip forward to 1953 to the labs of American biologist James Watson, English physicist Francis Crick and English chemist Rosalind Franklin and you’ll arrive just in time for these ground-breaking scientists to publish their discovery on the structure of DNA: a three-dimensional double-helix composed of four different structures called bases, glued to a backbone of phosphate and sugar.

DNA is something we all have in common, with the average human having approximately three billion of these bases per cell, divided among 23 pairs of chromosomes, each chromosome containing hundreds to thousands of genes that make us who we are.