Aubrey de Grey Interviewed For Wired
A brief interview with biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey can be found in the February issue of Wired magazine:
WIRED: Your Gerontology piece claims that the current approach to prolonging life - developing drugs that mimic nutrient deprivation - is wrong. How so?DE GREY: I present a detailed evolutionary argument that caloric restriction in humans will give only a very small increase in lifespan. Starved worms and flies can live many times longer than normal, whereas mice can live only about 40 percent longer and dogs only 10 to 15 percent. We'll get only two to three years from that approach. Better than nothing, but not enough. This is a big deal because the majority of academic-led biotech startups aimed at postponing aging are developing drugs based on caloric restriction.
WIRED: You think we can actually reverse aging instead of just slow it down?
DE GREY: That's right. The rejuvenation therapies we are on the verge of developing will actually repair cellular damage. The reason I think we're close is that we can describe what aging is in such minute detail, and we can also describe feasible, foreseeable ways of repairing each of those categories of damage that go together to make up aging.
You can read Aubrey de Grey's work in detail at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence website, and you can help to make his view of the future of rejuvenation research a reality by contributing to the Methuselah Mouse Prize fund.
SENS will make it into the public limelight once Time, Newsweek, or U.S. News does an article on it and Aubry. Since he was in Fortune last year (what about Forbes?), I suspect Time or Newsweek will do their article sometime this year.
I may be attending a "technology" panel sponsored by Washington State, sometime in April. This is one of these deals where they try to drum up biotech and nanotech business and investment capital into the region.
Washington State is considering a stem-cell research initiative, similar to California's Prop-71. If the people proposing this are at this panel and I have a chance to meet them, I may try to promote SENS as an alternative to yet another stem-cell research initiative.