Video: Aubrey de Grey at TEDxDanubia 2013
Aubrey de Grey is a tireless advocate for the development of rejuvenation biotechnology, the means to repair and reverse the root causes of aging, and he is the more visible face of the SENS Research Foundation - which is not to diminish the hard work of the many other folk, staff and volunteers, who have helped to make the Foundation the growing success it is today. Without their efforts the path towards human rejuvenation would be far longer. If you've been following along these past years, you'll know that de Grey travels widely to give a great many presentations to the public, and here is one example from a recent TEDx event in Hungary.
Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist and the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world's highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. His research targets the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair or obviate them. His comprehensive plan breaks aging down into seven major classes and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations.
The research proposals and therapies of SENS are one of those obvious-in-hindsight plans that can only emerge because a few people were visionary enough and stubborn enough to keep pushing until it gained acceptance. Without the SENS Research Foundation and the many people who contributed to bringing that organization into existence over the course of the past decade, the aging research community would still be entirely focused on either doing nothing to help treat degenerative aging, or working only on largely ineffective approaches aimed at slightly slowing down aging via the old-style drug discovery pipeline.
Related to this, I set up a subscription for donating to the SENS foundation yesterday afternoon. It's a nontrivial amount of money monthly.
What finally got my attention was paying my health insurance bill, and various health care bills from my yearly maintenance. So much money, with so little to show for it. I realized that at most a small fraction of that money was actually going toward fixing aging, and that by doubling down I could contribute as much to the end result as a dozen people who did not.