June 26, 2008
Aging: The Disease - The Cure - The Implications
Aubrey de Grey, of The Methuselah Foundation, is hosting a symposium on aging-as-disease at UCLA this weekend. He is working to raise funds to target the mechanisms of aging so that they can be reversed. He perceives the battle to be as much about public perception as about fund raising and research.
Less than a decade ago, de Grey was a relatively unknown computer scientist doing his own research into aging. As recently as three years ago a cadre of scientists wrote in the Nature-sponsored journal EMBO Reports, that his research program, known as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, was “so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community.” Also in 2005, MIT-sponsored magazine Technology Review went so far as to offer a $20,000 prize to anyone who could prove that de Grey’s program was “so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate.” (No one won.)
comments
One Response to “Aging: The Disease - The Cure - The Implications”
Leave a Reply
Molecular biology is now expanding at an explosive pace. What would happen if we were to push the rate of progress just that little bit more?
Meet the real life alliance of engineers, scientists, philanthropists and volunteer fund raisers all of whom have but one thing in common. None of whom want to have an appointment with the grave or the furnace several decades from as of today.
De Grey is a man with a mission. Consider this improbable scenario: a hitherto unknown Cambridge scientist realises he holds the key to saving the lives of countless millions. What is he to do? In that situation what would YOU do? This is not some improbable science-fiction scenario. This is here and right now.
I for one do not want to die.
The Race is ON
“What’s likely to happen within the next 20 to 25, 30 years, we will develop technology that will buy a bit of time. We will develop rejuvenation technology that can be applied to people that are already middle-age and keep them middle-age, or less so to speak, for another 20 or 30 years. During that 20 or 30 years, the technology will be further advanced to give them another, let’s say, 15 years, and so on.”
-Aubrey de Grey: Chief Science Officer. Methuselah Foundation
Let’s Roll !