I
n the West, we still regard reaching the age of 100 as something special. No matter that the population of centenarians is increasing significantly each year, the 100th birthday is almost always a cause for celebration.
Imagine, then, a scenario where your hundredth
birthday is no more an excuse for a party than your 28th, 47th or 53rd birthdays were. In fact, it means very little indeed in a world where there are people aged 300, 400 or older. You might get a cake with a couple of candles on it, but that’s it. Besides, you’re having too much fun – running marathons, staying up all night partying and jet-setting across the world – to worry about being a mere 100. You certainly don’t look or feel it, that’s for sure. It all sounds like something a Hollywood
screenwriter might have cooked up on a quiet day. Besides, we
all know the ageing process inevitable. As Shakespeare put it in Sonnet 73:
In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest
how it
Yes, we will all wither and die one day. That’s just is. Or
is it? Is the ageing process an
inevitable part of life, or is such ‘inevitability’ just our conditioned way of thinking? Do we really have to grow old, or could ageing be somehow defeated by modern medicine? Nine out of ten scientists would, perhaps, decide
to concentrate their life’s work on something rather less challenging than repairing and thus defeating the ageing process, but Aubrey de Grey - the man who proposed that the first human to live to 1,000 years old may have already been born – is no ordinary scientist. His research into ageing, and the damage caused to human bodies through ageing, has revealed some extraordinary and controversial results, splitting the scientific community. In short, you’re either with Dr de Grey or you’re against him. To his more conservative critics, Dr de Grey
certainly looks the part of a voice in the wilderness, with his long Tolkeinesque beard, skinny jeans, and habit of plain-speaking. They point to his background in computer science as a reason for him not to meddle in head-spinning biology. Naturally, the laconic 49-year-old Englishman living and working in California is dismissive of their scepticism. “I was a computer scientist in the early part of
my career,” he says, “and during that period I met and married
a biologist (geneticist Adelaide
Carpenter), from whom I learned a lot of biology. I became aware that, by and large, biologists were not interested in ageing, to my surprise. I thought this was tragic. I felt it was so important I decided to switch fields. It was never something I had uncertainty about; to me, it was obvious from
www.projectsmagazine.eu.com
early childhood that ageing was a bad thing and that we ought to be able to do something about it in due course, like a heart complaint. It never occurred to me that other people might not think the same way. “Within the scientific community my position
has been controversial for pretty normal reasons. In other words, wherever someone comes up with a radically new and pioneering approach to some particular problem, whether it’s scientific or technological, it often gets poorly appreciated and understood by the mainstream of the day. Within the wider world, there is a lot of controversy about ageing. The fundamental reason for this concern is that we have spent the entire history of civilisation putting ageing out of our minds, getting on with our miserably short lives and not being preoccupied by what is going to happen to us. We’ve become very good at deluding ourselves into thinking that ageing might not be a bad thing after all, even though it doesn’t look that way.” In short, Dr de Grey considers ageing to be a
disease; a disease that can be beaten by regenerative medicine. “It’s not about living long, it is about defeating ageing and living longer is a side effect,” he says. “This is the mistake that everyone makes and bangs on about all the time. People think that living longer is the centrepiece of the whole thing, and they ask about living
79
Above: Dr Aubrey de Grey
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