longer in a frail state, or how we would live if we were 1,000 years old. Interesting questions, but meaningless things to have an opinion about.
I
compare having an opinion about how long you want to live with having an opinion about what time you want to go to the toilet next Sunday. It’s not about living longer at all. Living longer is a great bonus, it’s a beneficial side effect, but it’s still a side effect.” At the centre of Dr de Grey’s research within his
own SENS (‘Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence’) Foundation, a charity based in Mountain View, California, are seven major types of therapy addressing seven major categories of cellular and molecular ageing damage. These categories are:
• cell loss, tissue atrophy • division-obsessed cells • death-resistant cells • mutant mitochondria • extracellular stiffening • extracellular aggregates • intracellular aggregates
The above list is Dr de Grey’s, but its items are
not. The discovery of extracellular aggregate damage was made as far back as 1907 and there’s a strong case that the seven categories are complete, as no new kinds of ageing damage have been discovered in a generation, despite increased research. What the SENS Foundation has done is to take these categories and propose solutions, known as ‘rejuvenation biotechnologies’. These already
exist in prototype form or are considered likely to work in the foreseeable future, given existing scientific developments. The plan is to repair the damage that limits healthy lifespan within our first 100 years. According to the Foundation this will not, initially, repair all the damage caused by ageing, but will rejuvenate our bodies and add significantly to human longevity. Once this first generation of therapies is developed the next aim will be to target the forms of ageing damage that take longer to cause us problems, thereby renewing the lease of healthy life that the first wave of therapies gave us. “We’re talking regenerative medicine,” says Dr
de Grey, “which means that rather than slowing ageing down, which is what people have been focusing on for a long time, we want to genuinely
“We’re talking regenerative medicine, which means rather than slowing ageing down we want to genuinely rejuvenate people, genuinely turn back the ageing clock”
rejuvenate people, genuinely turn back the ageing clock, repairing the molecular and cellular damage that accumulates through our lives. “The important thing about this
damage is that it accumulates as an intrinsic
and built-in side
effect of the normal operation of the human body. Therefore, stopping it being created in the first place would require a complete redesign of the human body, which we are not
in a
position to do. But that damage accumulates without any real functional consequence for a long, long time, for most of our lives, and the reason it doesn’t have a consequence is because the body is set up to cope with a certain amount of that damage. It’s only when the damage accumulates to a level that the body is not set up to tolerate that we start to see the emergence and progression of various diseases and disabilities. “Really, it’s just like preventive maintenance for
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