“So, you’ve decided to pull the plug by next winter. It will be wonderful to have a snowy funeral.” “Yes, that will be fine. Have been here for quite some time and it looks that I have stretched it a bit too far.” If you overhear a conversation like this between two doddering old men in the city park you probably would be in a time around the year 2040 and won’t be surprised to realise that these men are just talking about their death. If you go by the words of Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, heading a research dedicated to combating the aging process, death will become an option within 20-25 years.
We have long been of the notion that aging is natural, an evolutionary phenomenon that culminates in death, but Dr. Aubrey does not subscribe to this. He says that aging of a living organism is no different than aging of a simple, man-made machine. So, it’s totally reasonable to look at how we already succeeded in extending the healthy longevity of cars or aeroplanes way beyond how long they were designed to last, and apply the same principles to human aging. To put in a nutshell, combating aging involves preventative maintenance, i.e. repairing pre-symptomatic damage before symptoms emerge.
Initially trained as a computer scientist, Dr. Aubrey later switched to the biology of aging. At 30, to his astonishment, he discovered that very few researchers were really working on doing anything about aging. Currently he is the Chief Science Officer of SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Research Foundation, a California based biomedical research charity focused on developing the strategy for defeating aging. His research interest encompasses the causes of all cellular side-effects of metabolism that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and /or obviate that damage.
Image Credit: longevityworldforum.com
Dr. Aubrey regards cancer as the greatest potential threat to the longevity program, he finds viruses as a huge issue too. But when compared to cancer viruses are small and they don’t have many genes. Cancer has the entire human genome at its mutational disposal, he says. With effective vaccines, pandemics- another barrier on the way to longevity- can also be tackled. Aging is far less mysterious than most people assume, Dr. Aubrey claims. Unlike in the past, today almost all gerontologists agree that there are no genes for aging in humans.
Can the world, already suffocating with growing population, cope with people living so long? Dr. Aubrey is quick to rebut this. The influences of the trajectory of global population and how it would be altered by the defeat of aging need to be understood in a right way, he says. He is of the hope that the planet can certainly cope, partly because of falling fertility rates and rising age at childbirth. New technologies such as renewable energy and nuclear fusion will greatly increase the planet’s carrying capacity, he says.
