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Category: life extension
Aubrey de Grey, from Nov 28, 2017.
Virtual Futures presents Dr. Aubrey de Grey who claims to have drawn a roadmap to defeat biological aging and proposes that that the first human beings who will live to 1,000 years old have already been born.
Dr Aubrey de Grey is the Chief Scientific Officer and Co-founder of the SENS Research Foundation, a charity that researches the application of regenerative medicine to age-related disease, with the intent of repairing underlying damage to the body’s tissues, cells, and molecules. Their goal is to help build the industry that will cure the diseases of aging.
In conversation with Luke Robert Mason (Director, Virtual Futures).
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Find out more: http://virtualfutures.co.uk
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Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation took a few hours from his packed schedule yesterday to answer questions from the community at /r/futurology. It is a pity that we can’t get a full day of his time at some point — clearly there are way too many interested folk with questions and not enough hours to answer more than half of them. It is a sign of progress, I hope, that ever more people recognize that the SENS approach to the development of rejuvenation therapies is promising, and understand enough of the science to ask intelligent questions about the details.
SENS is simple enough to explain at the high level: identify the cell and tissue damage that (a) appears in old tissues but not in young tissues, and (b) is caused by the normal operation of metabolism, not by some other form of damage. The resulting short list includes the causes of aging. It may include some other things as well, that in the end turn out not to need fixing, but why take the chance? In modern biotechnology and life science research, it is faster and cheaper to develop a repair therapy and see what happens than it is to painstakingly figure out how everything fits together.
When de Grey first evaluated the field of aging research, back before the turn of the century, he found that the causes of aging by the above definition were largely known, with a good deal of evidence in support of each one. Yet next to no-one was working on fixing them. Since then, he has campaigned tirelessly to build organisations, assemble allies, raise funding, and persuade researchers, and all of that to ensure that the scientific and biotechnology communities do in fact move ahead with a repair-based approach to building functional rejuvenation therapies. It has been surprisingly hard work, given a research community that was hostile towards the idea of treating aging as a medical condition versus merely observing it, and a public at large who seem disinterested in living longer in good health.
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What is a body other than the vessel for your consciousness? Does the one you’re using right now really matter all that much? Why not, when your current body gets all old and run down, don’t you just get a new, young, beautiful, and healthy one? That’s the pitch in the first trailer for Netflix’s new dystopian sci-fi series Altered Carbon, which takes the form of an advertisement for Psychasec.
“Centuries ago, mankind discovered a way to transfer consciousness into a new body making death a mere inconvenience,” says the commercial. “Since then we’ve been providing an unparalleled pedigree of human sleeves to only the most discerning clientele. Psychasec: Live forever in the body you deserve.”
Based on Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 award-winning cyberpunk novel, Altered Carbon is set hundreds of years in the future when the super rich can repeatedly trade out their bodies (called “sleeves”) to live forever. The new Netflix series follows a soldier/P.I. named Takeshi Kovacs (played by both Will Yun Lee and Joel Kinnman) who wakes up centuries later in a new body to solve the murder of a billionaire.
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Given there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the futurology subreddit, we thought it was a great time to have a look at the progress the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA where you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.
Given that there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the Futurology subreddit, we think it’s a great time to have a look at the progress that the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA, in which you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.
Today, there are many drugs and therapies that we take for granted. However, we should not forget that what is common and easily accessible today didn’t just magically appear out of thin air; rather, at some point, it used to be an unclear subject of study on which “more research was needed”, and even earlier, it was just a conjecture in some researcher’s head.
Hopefully, one day not too far into the future, rejuvenation biotechnologies will be as normal and widespread as aspirin is today, but right now, we’re in the R&D phase, so we should be patient and remind ourselves that the fact that we can’t rejuvenate people today doesn’t mean that nothing is being done or has been achieved to that end. On the contrary, we are witnessing exciting progress in basic research—the fundamental building blocks without which rejuvenation, or any new technology at all, would stay a conjecture.
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Dr. Hébert will be in Berlin to provide an update on his fascinating work. The use of stem cells to repair the brain is relatively straightforward for Parkinson’s disease, in which cell depletion is localized to one small region, but in Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions, the cell loss is widely distributed, whereas cells can only be injected into one spot. The solution that Dr. Hébert explores is to make those cells migrate before dividing and differentiating.
https://www.undoing-aging.org/dr-jean-hebert-to-speak-at-undoing-aging-2018
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Dr. Aubrey de Grey is the Chief Science Officer, founder of the SENS Research Foundation (SRF) and one of the original proponents of a damage repair-based approach to aging and age-related diseases. His work has inspired many others to think about aging differently and entertain the idea that, perhaps, we do not have to accept the suffering that age-related diseases cause.
Recently, Dr. de Grey published an article in MIT Technology Review; here, we explain why this is a real milestone of progress.
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Aubrey de Grey has set himself a simple task. The 54-year-old cofounder of the SENS Research Foundation wants to end biological aging for good. So sure is he of his mission, he proclaims the first human being to live to the age of 1,000 has already been born. De Grey believes that, within the next 20 years or so, scientists will finally solve one of humanity’s greatest problems.
“The fact is, aging kills 110,000 people worldwide every fucking day,” de Grey said at a Virtual Futures event attended by Inverse in London on Wednesday, in a conversation with group director Luke Robert Mason. “It doesn’t just kill them. You have to take into account all the suffering that comes before.”
Through his foundation, de Grey is working to solve seven types of aging damage that he believes are the key to a breakthrough. These are tissue atrophy, cancerous cells, mitochondrial mutations, death -resistant cells, extracellular matrix stiffening, extracellular aggregates, and intracellular aggregates. It may sound like a complex salad of jargon, but de Grey claims that because science has an understanding of how to fix all these damages, aging can end for good.
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