



Dr Aubrey de Grey is a prominent biomedical gerontologist and chief science officer of the SENS Foundation. He is editor-in-chief of Rejuvenation Research, a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations.



During his 20 years of work on the biology of ageing he has become well known for his often controversial views and eccentric manner. These centre on the largely theoretical potential to develop techniques to eliminate ageing from our bodies and extend human life expectancy significantly, for potentially up to 1,000 years.



We meet de Grey in a pub in Cambridge on a bright yet chilly Sunday afternoon. He is an intriguing figure; his cut-glass English accent contrasting with the Old Testament-style beard (apparently his wife is a fan) and eclectic attire.

Originally a computer scientist, he graduated from Cambridge in 1985, and spent several years working on artificial intelligence research in software verification. During that time he met his wife, a biology professor. "So over the next couple of years I kind of accidentally learnt a lot of biology," he explains. "Very gradually it began to dawn on me that we were never talking about ageing.

To me, ageing was the world's most important problem. It was so obvious that I never tested the assumption. I always presumed that everyone else thought the same."

Shocked to discover that biologists were not focusing on this issue, de Grey started to devote his spare time to educating himself on his wife's specialism, before eventually switching career fields to focus on the topic full-time a few years later. Although his first few papers were well received, once he began to talk about reversing the ageing process he struggled to gain acceptance within the scientific community: "You know, people have this crazy concept that ageing is natural and inevitable, and I have to keep explaining that it is not."

His views on ageing are simple. "The human body is a machine with moving parts and like a car or an aeroplane, it accumulates damage throughout life as a consequence of normal operation."

Historically, efforts to postpone the ill health of old age have focused on finding ways to clean up our metabolism so that we accumulate damage to the body more slowly. About 15 years ago, de Grey had a 'Eureka!' moment upon realising that the most practical way to achieve this would be to find ways to repair the damage rather than looking to slow it down. "I realised we can classify different types of genetic damage into seven major categories, for each of which there is a different repair approach". This is the focus of the SENS foundation. "We have all these diverse projects across various strands of research that we think need to be done, and because we are an independent non-profit charity, we have the luxury of being able to work on the hardest problems."

Although some of his views are met with scepticism and disbelief, he feels that the scientific community is become more accepting of his ideas, citing a recent breakthrough publication in Science, one of the world's leading scientific academic publications.

"As time goes on, our progress becomes more significant in proving the feasibility of my ideas. When I first started talking about these, people found them heretical and there was a lot of denigration from the scientific community, but I've gradually won them over. Other people are also making progress in actually implementing what we're doing. Just recently, an important US paper came out that showed you could extend the lifespan of mice using a particular type of damage repair that we'd been talking about for a decade."

The topic of longevity expansion has also featured in mainstream media of late, with a particular focus on preliminary studies that have found anti-ageing properties in drugs such as Metformin, Rapamycin and Resveratrol, which all demonstrate a phenomenon called calorie-restriction mimetics. De Grey explains what this means for his research. "Essentially, these are drugs that trick the body into thinking that it's in a famine situation when it isn't. Studies have shown that if you take a mouse or a rat and you reduce its normal food intake by 30%, it lives about 30% longer than it would otherwise.

"This was discovered 80 years ago and has been a major topic of interest among gerontologists. Unfortunately, it doesn't scale. The longer-lived the species that you look at, the less the effect of famine in terms of longevity.



