Aubrey DeGrey, We Salute You

This is a tribute to one of BIPT’s favorite scientists, Aubrey DeGray.  Ruthlessly rational, obsessively optimistic, and ferociously focused --- yes SIR, Aubrey is an evolved mammal.  His goal is nothing less than human immortality.  No matter how you feel about that, his work needs to be considered if you’re a human on Earth, because we could be looking at radically altering the entire game rules of human life, and that, in the immortal words of our president, is “probably kinda important”.

Like a lot of people, I found out about Aubrey de Grey when MIT Technology Review did an article about him.  The article, written by Sherwin Nuland, was fairly condescending, but after all, human immortality is a pretty insane goal to pursue.  I thought Nuland did an excellent job of bringing a normal, consensus-reality line of questions to bear on de Grey’s hypothesis, and made it clear and accessable.  The real surprise was the Letter from the Editor which started the magazine.  Jason Pontin apparently has serious beef with de Grey:

But what struck me is that he is a troll. For all de Grey’s vaulting ambitions, what Sherwin Nuland saw from the outside was pathetically circumscribed. In his waking life, de Grey is the computer support to a research team; he dresses like a shabby graduate student and affects Rip Van Winkle’s beard; he has no children; he has few interests outside the science of biogerontology; he drinks too much beer.

So first of all, notice Jason Pontin has never even met de Grey and is in fact reacting to “what Sherwin Nuland saw.” (Worth noting that the photo of de Gray that opened the article --- smiling, drinking a beer in the pub --- is how Nuland conducted the interview, and thus, what he actually saw.)

You can read his entire Editor’s Letter for yourself.  It’s interesting to note that he later modulated his tune considerably in this semi-retraction:

Some of de Grey’s followers pointed out that the author of the February profile, Dr. Sherwin Nuland (who is Professor of Clinical Surgery at Yale), did not directly criticize the biology behind de Grey’s “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” (or SENS). I promised readers to find a working biogerontologist who would do so. But while some biologists have criticized SENS to me privately, none have been willing to do so in public. I attribute this to their desire to preserve their careers: whilst the science of aging is an interesting and expanding area of scientific research, the field of human life-extension is peopled with crazies. It is not - at least not yet - a respectable field of study. Perhaps, too, there is this: biogerontologists have their own jobs, and they don’t have the time to study something that seems outside their immediate area of specialization. Still, I am increasingly sympathetic with de Grey about this at least: if he is so wrong, why won’t any biogerontologists say why he is wrong? If he is totally nuts, it shouldn’t be so hard to explain the faults in his science, surely?

Surely, the reader is beginning to see a slightly different picture.  So what does de Gray actually say that’s getting people so wound up, angry, and downright unscientific?

Living Forever, or At Least Getting Close

That is the list of reasons we actually die.  Not because God hates us, not because Death is just a magical part of the circle, but because these specific failures on the molecular and cellular level weaken our bodies to the point we can no longer sustain life.  This non-mystical, problem-solving approach to death is for some reason strange, unpopular and generally considered to be “nuts”.

It’s worth noting one of the most strident critics of the “live to be 1000 years old” claim is Aubrey de Gray himself:

It’s certainly ridiculous to suppose that we will have therapies in the next few decades that will allow us to live more than a few decades longer than we do now, let alone 1000 years. But we don’t need therapies like that in order for people who are in middle age in a few decades from now to live to 1000. Why not? Because we only have to fix things in time, not all at once. We don’t need to know how to stop people dying of aging at age 150 yet—we won’t need to know that until we have some 150-year-olds. Same for 200-year-olds, and so on. When we look at the historical precedent for the rate at which new technologies (flight, computers, etc.) are improved once they are first achieved at all, this means that even the first-generation rejuvenation therapies, the ones that give us only a few decades, will almost certainly be enough to put us above “life extension escape velocity” such that we won’t die of aging however long we live.

For those about to dig deeper

As a side note, Jason Pontin’s outburst is not unique.  I used to think that R.D. Laing’s insistence that our Western culture worshipped death was an exaggeration, if not a fabrication.  After examining the work of de Gray, and especially the work of his critics, I am beginnging to wonder. Almost nobody addresses de Gray’s work, but all of them defend death like it was their sister’s honor.

If you’d like to take a deeper look at this research, the best place to start is the unfortunately titled but well-written ”Time to Talk SENS”.  (After that, try ”A Strategy for Postponing Aging Indefinitely”.)

Obviously, de Grey is very much used to hostile disbelief by now and runs some outstanding FAQ pages to address the stuff he’s probably fairly f***ing sick of talking about. 

De Gray currently publishes his work for Rejuvenation Research.