Want to live to be a thousand years old? It's not far-fetched at all if you ask theoretician and geneticist Aubrey de Grey. He believes within the next 25 years there is a 50/50 chance we'll have the technologies to extend human life indefinitely. I learned of Aubrey and his ideas in 2005 and immediately pitched the story to NBC's Today Show. They were intrigued. With the help of correspondent Kerry Sanders and the London bureau, we went out and interviewed Aubrey in a pub in Cambridge. When we finished the story we sent it in to the show. It was promptly killed. Too out there for a mainstream audience. Plus it didn't help that Aubrey looked like Methuselah.
Fast forward to 2011 and there Aubrey was in the news again. This time I pitched the story to HDNet's World Report. The program is always looking for stories that deal with interesting issues and are not widely told. This time correspondent Willem Marx met up with Aubrey in a pub in Cambridge and also went punting with him on the Thames River. For my part, I finally got to meet Aubrey at his SENS Foundation laboratory in Mountain View, California. He is tall and wiry and moves like someone with no time to lose. He lovingly strokes the beard which hangs almost to his waist. I asked him if his distinctive look helped or hurt him as he went out in the world trying to win over scientists and venture capitalists to support his work. He said it helped because people looked at him and saw a guy who is not materialistic in the least. It's very clear to them that he is not doing this to get rich.
Through his SENS Foundation nonprofit, Aubrey and the scientists who work with him are creating an intersection between research on the biology of aging and regenerative medicine. By doing experiments with the building blocks of cells they hope to someday develop treatments that repair the damage caused by aging, and restore people to a state where they are biologically younger than they were when they started. In other words, people could live out their entire lives as healthy as young adults. Five years ago, the scientific community considered his ideas kind of kooky but now the research is catching up with his theories and Aubrey is gaining credibility. "This is not science fiction anymore, this is science forseeable," Aubrey proclaims.
Of course the implications are mind boggling but Aubrey brushes them off.
People always say hang on. If we stop the problem of aging we're going to have a whole lot of other problems. We're going to have overpopulation or dictators who live forever, or how will we have the pensions, or won't it be boring. If I want to be flippant, I say those are problems I'd like to have, thank you very much.
Ultimately I don't see people who want to get cancer or Alzheimer's disease or cardiovascular disease or Type 2 Diabetes or any of these things we are going to prevent by curing aging. I don't meet people who want any of those things so I find it frustrating when people take the view we're going to create the problems and refuse to adopt any sense of proportion about this and accept the problem we have today is a big one, a problem that kills 100,000 people every day, most of them after a long period of ill health and disease and debilitation and dependence and decrepitude.
It's pretty clear that the problem we would solve is quite a big one, and yes, the transition to a post aging world is going to be a big one, and the more forward planning we do to make it less turbulent the better, but the transition to the industrial revolution was pretty turbulent too, yet there aren't many people who believe the industrial revolution was a mistake.
If you want to learn more about Aubrey de Grey and his work and vision tune in to HDNet's World Report on Tuesday, May 17th at 9 p.m. ET/7 p.m. MT.
For more information on Vicky Collins visit Teletrends Television Production and Development.