Is Aubrey de Grey full of shit?
It’s an important question. There’s a chance – and I’m really not trying to overstate the case here – it’s the most important question ever asked in the history of humanity.
De Grey, who has a Ph.D. in biology from Cambridge University, in England, is a biomedical gerontologist, a scientist who studies the causes and effects of aging. Many of his peers are infuriated by him. Some say that merely referring to de Grey as a gerontologist – or, for that matter, a peer – taints the entire profession. Technology Review, a serious, scholarly magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, went so far as to hold a contest, with a $20,000 prize to the scientist who could prove that de Grey is, indeed, full of shit. (More specifically, the goal was to demonstrate to a panel of judges that de Grey’s chief idea is “so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate.”) Nobody won.
One of the reasons it’s hard to simply dismiss de Grey is that he’s extraordinarily brilliant. Even his detractors concede as much. Sherwin Nuland, professor emeritus of medicine at Yale and a prominent author, has called de Grey a “single-minded zealot” who could cause the “destruction of our planet.” Yet he also compared his intellect and originality with that of Leonardo da Vinci. I’ve heard, while speaking with others, de Grey mentioned in the same breath as Darwin, Newton, and Einstein.
Either way, destroyer or da Vinci, it seems valuable to seriously consider, if only for a moment, what de Grey has to say – and what it could mean if he is not full of shit.
Because what Dr. Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey says is that we do not have to grow old and die.
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Of course it sounds preposterous. I know this. But aging, as de Grey like to points out, is a poorly understood phenomenon. Though we accept as inevitable that every human being is destined to age and die, we still don’t know why.
Aging experts agree that the main reason we all wear out – our cellular and molecular scaffolding inexorably deteriorating, no matter how much we exercise or how well we eat – is simply because it requires less effort than not wearing out. This is known as evolutionary neglect. Once we get a few years past reproductive age, there is no evolutionary reason we need to continue living, and since it’s troublesome to keep each of our trillions of cells in proper working condition, the path of least resistance is for them to break down.
That doesn’t mean it has to happen. Evolutionary neglect is vastly different than evolutionary intent. We don’t actively die; we just get passive about living. The consensus among biologists is that the biochemical signals encoded in our DNA instruct our bodies to focus on self-repair only long enough for us to reproduce and ensure the success of our offspring. But what if we could learn these signals? And adjust the messages they’re attempting to send?
It’s not just outliers like de Grey who have refused to meekly accept our fate. “There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death,” wrote Richard Feynman, one of the luminaries of twentieth-century science, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics. (He died in 1988.) “This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble.”
De Grey insists that, if his plan is funded and shown to work, it’s possible that the first thousand-year-old human has already been born, and maybe the first 5,000-year-old, and perhaps even the first one-million year-old. Yes: a million-year-old. “I’m not encumbered by convention,” he says. “And I’m not intimidated by pissing people off.”
The best part of de Grey’s plan is that we won’t merely be hanging on, withered and decrepit, all these years. Not in the least. De Grey’s plan calls for millennium after millennium of youth, of vigor, of sex. Even if we’re middle-aged right now, de Grey will first rejuvenate our cells to perform as if they’re biologically young. “I think it’s reasonable to suppose,” he says, “that one could oscillate between being biologically twenty and biologically twenty-five indefinitely.”
Such possibilities are apparently not outside the laws of nature. There already exist organisms that hardly seem to age. Bristlecone pines can live 5,000 years; there’s evidence that some bacterial spores have survived twenty-five million years. Both the hydra, a tiny freshwater animal with thin, stinging tentacles, and a small, bell-shaped jellyfish, Turritopsis nutricula, appear immune from aging and may, indeed, be immortal. They can still perish – if you crush them, if you remove them from water – but old age might never kill them.
Aging, the way de Grey sees it, is the most devastating humanitarian crisis of all time. “Every day,” he says, “more than 100,000 people die of aging.” It’s unfathomable to him that most of world’s top biogerontologists, in his opinion, simply assume that aging is inevitable and spend their time on other projects. We’re all victims of a “pro-aging trance,” as de Grey calls it. “We’re suffering the equivalent of thirty World Trade Centers a day,” he says, “and no one’s doing a damn thing about it.”
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The first time I saw Aubrey de Grey – and no matter how you feel about him, it’s pretty hard to forget your initial sighting – was at Cambridge University in September 2009, where he was hosting a five-day conference highlighting the latest discoveries in aging-related research. More than 200 scientists from twenty-eight nations had arrived.
When I walked in, on the conference’s opening day, lunch was about to be served and every attendee save one was strolling from the lecture hall to the dining room on a sidewalk inscribed along the perimeter of a grassy quadrangle. De Grey was the exception. The man is a twittery bundle of excess energy, seemingly over-caffeinated before he’s drunk one cup, and there was no way he could casually navigate the crowded path. A shorter, quicker route was available, and I watched as he performed a sort of private steeple chase, leaping over a low concrete wall – graceful, long-limbed – bounding across the grass, and with another jeté, springing back onto the sidewalk. Then he disappeared into the dining room.
His energy, though, is not the chief reason de Grey is immediately memorable. It’s his hair. De Grey has a lot of hair. A great reddish-brown mass atop his head, usually lassoed into a fraying ponytail; a bushy horseshoe of a mustache; topiary sideburns; and, causing heads to turn wherever he goes, an incredible ZZ Top beard that descends nearly to his belly button.
In all the time I spent with de Grey – several weeks, across two continents – I saw him wear a suit and tie only once, to deliver a lecture at the New York Academy of Sciences. There was no label in the jacket. “I think it’s from the Salvation Army,” he told me. His usual outfit, one he wore every day of his Cambridge conference, is a wrinkled T-shirt, faded jeans, and old Stan Smith sneakers. For a recent appearance on CNN he wore fuzzy pink socks.
He does not own a television or a cell phone, though he answers his e-mail obsessively, on a MacBook Pro with a partially broken screen. He hasn’t been to the movies, he says, in twenty years, and in the past decade has read only the Harry Potter books for pleasure. He’s fifty years old, a shade over six feet tall, and thin as a nail, with an upper-crust British accent softened by a slight lisp, and skin pale as a freshly peeled potato. He has a particularly low tolerance for unintelligent small talk. He once informed a reporter, point-blank, that a question of his was “breathtakingly stupid,” and then turned away and started a conversation with someone else. (Alright, fine, the reporter was me. I had asked him to predict how old he’d be when he died.)
His wife, Adelaide Carpenter, an American-born geneticist specializing in the study of fruit flies, works in a lab at Cambridge. She’s nineteen years older than de Grey. She’s also missing nearly all her front teeth. I got the feeling that neither de Grey nor Carpenter are beholden to anything so banal as appearances, as if they’d transcended such superficialities and live almost exclusively in the realm of the mind.
They refused to let me visit their Cambridge apartment – by all accounts, including de Grey’s, it’s a mess. “I’m not good at throwing things away,” he admits. They have no children. “Kids are time-consuming,” he says, “and lots of other people seem perfectly good at raising them.”
De Grey himself is an only child, brought up in middle-class comfort in a London townhouse by a single mother. He never met his father. As a youth, he says, he was “a nerdy loner, hopeless at sport,” though gifted at programming personal computers, which were in their earliest generations. He also believed he was destined to change the world. When his mother encouraged him to take up the piano, he refused, he says, because he realized that the best possible outcome was that he’d become a great pianist, which would not alter the course of history. Ever self-aware, de Grey is the first call himself “an arrogant bastard.”
He received a bachelor’s degree from Cambridge in computer science and spent a decade on the development of artificial intelligence. Only after he married Carpenter, in 1991, did he become obsessed with aging theory, immersing himself in the relevant literature of aging. He read, day and night, for three years and emerged with an idea about the mechanics of mitochondria. He expanded his idea into a book, The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, which argued that damage to mitochondrial DNA was one of the chief causes of aging. The book so impressed the faculty at Cambridge that they awarded him a Ph.D.
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The best way to observe de Grey’s mind at work, or at least the best way I found, is to feed him a steady diet of beer. (A decent English ale, preferably.) Beer, de Grey told me, is an ideal catalyst for inspiration. “It’s a very good source of energy,” he insisted, “if you metabolize it well.” He metabolizes it well. On several occasions I tried to keep pace with him, beer for beer, pontification for jotted-down pontification, and each time I ended up with several dozen notebook pages covered in illegible scrawl. One evening, when I started to lag, he reached across the table and finished my own beer. That same night, I kept a precise list of all the solid food he ingested over the course of an intense, energetic twelve-hour period. The total: two cubes of cheddar cheese.
At de Grey’s Cambridge conference, I met many people touting life-extension ideas, the sort that crop up, like a flavor of the month, in just about every health-related website or magazine. The calorie restrictors. The exercise gurus. The Okinawa dieters. The Sardinia dieters. The Nova Scotia dieters. Someone mentioned a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin (boosts testosterone; enhances muscle mass). There were a couple of resveratrol pushers (thwarts cancer; lowers blood sugar). One guy offered to sell me pills that would provide cellular rejuvenation ($4,000 per six-month supply).
De Grey ignores all of these. He follows no special diet, he ingests no pills, he has no regular exercise regimen. Each of these may add a few years to your life, but to a man shooting for a millennium, they’re little more than rounding errors. He’s not seeking to delay old age: His plan calls for aging to be halted altogether. This is not to imply he’s cavalier risk-taker. He does not own a car, he says, because after taking four driving lessons at age seventeen, he realized he had “a massive mental block about piloting an unguided missile.” And in case he’s run over while pedaling his ancient Sun Solo ten-speed around Cambridge, he’s signed up to be cyropreserved – stored in a tank of liquid nitrogen until, it’s hoped, he can be thawed and revived – at Alcor, a facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the head of baseball star Ted Williams is reportedly kept. (De Grey’s going full-body, but it’s cheaper just to freeze your head and assume that, in the future, it’ll be no problem growing a clone.)
De Grey’s “eureka moment,” as he calls it, came at four o’clock in the morning on June 25, 2000, in a hotel room in Manhattan Beach, California, where he was attending a biogerontology conference. Jet-lagged beyond any hope of sleep, de Grey let his thoughts drift. Rather than wrestle with all the intricate, interlinked metabolic elements that could be responsible for causing the body to grow old and die, he decided to simplify things. Forget understanding the mystery of aging. How about, instead, just fixing it?
He grabbed a pen and notepad. And he jotted down a list of everything that had to be cured to prevent the onset of physical and mental degeneration. Though the categories were somewhat broad, to his great surprise, there were only seven items. Since then, most of de Grey’s energy has been focused on formulating a grand blueprint outlining step-by-step treatments for each of the seven things. He calls his plan Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, or SENS.
Here, in the tiniest of nutshells (the full version of his SENS idea, which he published in a book, runs to 433 pages), is de Grey’s tally of the human body’s seven deadly sins, and how we’ll fix each of them:
1) Chromosomes mutate. Some mutations result in the unchecked growth of damaged cells, the cause of every type of cancer. Fix: Use gene therapy to prevent cells from generating the enzyme telomerase, which should stem the growth of cancer cells.
2) Mitochondria also mutate. Mitochondria, the cellular power plants, contain small strands of DNA that are vulnerable to attack by unstable molecules known as free radicals. Such attacks can eventually trigger age-related issues like Parkinson’s disease and heart attacks. Fix: Again employing gene therapy, transfer a backup copy of mitochondrial DNA to the relative bomb-shelter of the cell’s nucleus.
3) Cells become clogged. Chiefly, this is the accumulation of lipofuscin, which eventually manifests itself as arteriosclerosis. Fix: Genetically modify waste-eating enzymes that exist in certain soils – primarily in graveyards, where they break down human remains – then deliver them to our bodies to eat away the lipofuscin.
4) Debris accumulate outside our cells. As we age, the fluid around our cells becomes increasingly crowded with amyloid plaque, which our body can’t break down. This buildup is associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Fix: A vaccination that will provoke our immune cells to digest plaque.
5) We get stiff. Over the course of our lifetime, protein molecules that once independently sailed through our extracellular fluid begin fusing with other molecules, leading to the hardening of tissues and high blood pressure. Fix: Create bond-breaking drugs that will not harm any other molecules.
6) Cells don’t die. Our body gradually accumulates renegade, indestructible fat cells, which ultimately triggers diabetes and other ailments. Fix: Insert so-called “suicide genes” into our bodies, which will target and destroy unwanted cells.
7) Cells do die. Nondividing cells, found in the heart and brain, are not naturally replaced when they die. This can lead to heart failure and dementia. Fix: Use periodic stem-cell transfusions that regrow lost cells.
The SENS project is complex beyond comprehension – each individual step, if successfully accomplished, is probably worth a half-dozen Nobel Prizes. Faced with such challenges, de Grey is characteristically demure. “In principle,” de Grey says, “we already know how to fix all seven. This is going to happen. There’s much more than a fifty percent chance that someone alive today will live to be 1,000.”
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De Grey does not run a laboratory. He performs no hands-on experiments. Rather than confining himself to one narrow field, his role in SENS is that of overarching theoretician. He analyzes other people’s work, and charts the innovations and disappointments from hundreds of labs across dozens of disciplines. Then he synthesizes all this information and applies what’s pertinent to his grand idea. His job, in essence, is to think.
Let’s just examine for a minute how de Grey thinks he’s going to cure all cancer. The answer, in a word, is telomeres. Telomeres are the genetic equivalent of the caps at the ends of shoelaces; they prevent the DNA strands in chromosomes from unraveling. Each time a cell divides, the telomeres become a little worn down. Once they’re used up, the cell quickly self-destructs. Cells have the ability to renew their telomere length by producing an enzyme called telomerase. This enzyme is the focus of de Grey’s cure.
Cancer cells reproduce at a furious pace, and in so doing swiftly wear their telomeres down to the nubs. The cells rely on a liberal squirt of telomerase to renew their tips and resume their out-of-control growth. If de Grey can find a way to halt the production of telomerase, the cancer cells will merely reach the ends of their telomeric ropes and fall apart. No tumor. No cancer. And this applies to every kind of cancer.
It’s difficult to determine just how possible this really is. Gene therapy – one of the chief tools in de Grey’s plan – is still in its infancy. To believe in de Grey’s ideas, you must feel, as he does, that we’re at the cusp of an age of biotechnology innovation. De Grey likes to compare the future of treating aging to the time line of human-powered flight. For millennia, we dreamed about flying. Nothing happened. Five-hundred years ago, Leonardo de Vinci presented detailed drawings of flying machines. Nothing happened. A legion of naysayers insisted it would never happen. Then, in a mad rush, we catapulted from the Wright brothers to Lindbergh to the Concord to the Space Shuttle.
Fewer than sixty years have passed since Watson and Crick – modern medicine’s Orville and Wilbur – proposed the structure of DNA. It’s been only a decade since the Human Genome Project mapped our genetic sequence. Gene therapy wasn’t even theorized until the 1960s. The basic premise is that we’ll place bits of genetic material into harmless viruses, which will act as miniature carrier pigeons, flying through the bloodstream, into the cells, and directly to the nucleus, where the payload will be delivered. The new DNA will be incorporated into our genetic code, altering the function of the cell.
In the past few years, gene therapy has been used in several medical breakthroughs. It was applied to cure squirrel monkeys of color blindness, and recently doctors in Paris used the technique to slow a fatal brain disease called X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy in two seven-year-old boys. What comes next, de Grey predicts, is a series of tremendous medical progressions, each a further order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything available today.
De Grey’s first challenge is to demonstrate that these therapies work on mice. Ninety-nine percent of mice genes have human equivalents. If money were no object, de Grey believes we could be on the path to creating Methuselah mice in less than a decade. Then it’s on to humans. Once we start de Grey’s SENS treatments on humans, we won’t immediately rocket from the current longevity record (Jeanne Calment of France, who died at age 122 in 1997) directly into thousand-year life expectancies. Inevitably, progress will come haltingly, a breakthrough here, a setback there.
But if, like aviation, the advances keep mounting, then it’s theoretically possible that the human lifespan will, on average, be lengthened more than one year every year. It’s not off-the-charts crazy: Over the course of the twentieth century, the average American lifespan grew from forty-five years to about seventy-seven. That’s roughly four months a year. If all goes according to plan – and de Grey, typically, has no doubt it will – some of us alive today may reach this glorious point where, with each year we age, we’ll actually increase the amount of time we’re expected to live. We’ll have achieved what de Grey calls Longevity Escape Velocity.
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One of the earliest known works of literature, the 4,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, is chiefly about a quest for immortality. A Chinese medical text from 400 BC mentions an “elixir of deathlessness.” Roger Bacon, a thirteenth century English philosopher, ingested liquid gold in an effort to stave off old age. In the early 1500s, Ponce de Leon supposedly wandered the swamps of Florida, seeking the Fountain of Youth. In Vienna in the 1920s, men had electric currents passed through their testicles in the belief that it rejuvenated youthfulness.
De Grey, according to his many critics, is simply the latest proponent of history’s longest-running pipe dream. In 2005 a statement signed by twenty-eight scientists was published in the journal of the European Molecular Biology Organization. “The idea that a research programme organized around the SENS agenda will not only retard ageing, but also reverse it – creating young people from old ones – and do so within our lifetime, is so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community,” they wrote. Here’s what other researchers have said about de Grey’s plan: It’s “specious nonsense,” “pseudoscientific propaganda,” “an elaborate deception,” “magical thinking,” “scientific misconduct,” a “crude biomedical fantasy,” and “a fairy tale.”
Not a cheap fairy tale, either. What de Grey needs from us – from taxpayers, or donors, or charitable foundations – is a billion dollars. One hundred million dollars a year for the next ten years, he estimates, to coordinate and fund all the laboratory work, mostly using mice, which will prove his SENS thesis: Aging is a molecular and cellular disease that can, with advanced technology, be cured.
None of the criticism fazes De Grey. His says that his detractors – traditional scientists, obsessed with observing and understanding and deconstructing – possess little creativity or mental flexibility. If people like them ruled the world, he says, we’d still be trying to get planes to fly by flapping their wings. “Most scientists,” he adds, “are really not very smart.”
Even if you can get over what de Grey calls the “conceptual bends” and accept that some of us might celebrate our thousandth birthday, there are still serious questions to answer. Like: How are we going to handle all the extra people?
Naturally, de Grey has an answer. He contends that there aren’t going to be any extra people. At first, yes, the population will mushroom; with few people dying, that’s bound to happen. But freedom from old age will have to be coupled with some severe demographic shackles. One of these, de Grey says, is a virtual halt on having babies. The building blocks of life – that is, our genes – have been passed from generation to generation, back to the dawn of humanity, back to our hominid ancestors, back to very origins of life on Earth. This means, genetically speaking, we are already immortal. De Grey is willing to end this chain. We will, in essence, become a world without children.
Some say that de Grey seems less a scientist than a cult leader, meddling in God’s realm. De Grey – who describes his religious beliefs as being on “the atheist edge of agnostic” – points out that for most of human history, life expectancy was probably no more than twenty years. Should we not have increased it? For those who say “death is part of life,” de Grey responds that tuberculosis was once part of life, too, and we didn’t have much hesitation in making that no longer a part of life when we found out how.
There’s also the possibility – sometimes forgotten amid all the posturing and insulting – that de Grey could actually be right. After all, even with a $20,000 prize offered by Technology Review, no scientist could prove that it wasn’t worth at least taking a closer look at de Grey’s plan. “Every now and then, radical ideas turn out to be true,” wrote one of the contest’s judges, Nathan Myhrvold, a child prodigy who completed his Ph.D. at Princeton in theoretical and mathematical physics at age twenty-three and later was chief technology officer of Microsoft. “Indeed, these exceptions are often the most momentous discoveries in science.”
It’s easy to poke fun at Aubrey de Grey and his quixotic ideas, but a couple of weeks in his presence made it obvious to me that he’s entirely serious about his quest. I don’t think he’s full of shit in the least. I have no idea if a single one of his seven steps will work, but I’m grateful for his crazy devotion. He says he never takes a day off, because he’s acutely aware that every day he’s delayed means another 100,000 humans will die. He’s not getting rich – his tiny apartment doesn’t even have a washing machine – and he isn’t driven by his own self-preservation. Rather, he’s practically killing himself, it sometimes seems, so that the rest of us may have a chance to live. I, for one, deeply wish for his success. The truth is, I’d like to be young again. I’d like to be young for a thousand years.
And even if de Grey isn’t correct, there might be significant ancillary benefits to his ideas. So perhaps we won’t live to be a thousand, but maybe de Grey and his team will make a few smaller breakthroughs and we’ll all get to 150. Or his efforts could help cure Alzheimer’s disease. Or diabetes. Or cancer. If his insights allow us to live only five extra years, or just one year – or, hell, one month – isn’t that worth the three bucks he asks from every man, woman, and child in the United States? Maybe tossing a billion at de Grey isn’t a waste at all. Maybe, once you think about it, it’s an absolute bargain.
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