a machine like a car or an aeroplane. The big breakthrough I made back in 2000 that led to everything that’s happened since was to realise that we actually knew a great deal about this molecular and cellular damage and that we could classify it into a manageable number of categories. Within each of these we could describe in a lot of detail how we might go about implementing this repair. For example, one category is loss of cells, cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other
cells. And stem cell
therapy is precisely the way we go about fixing that. And it
turns out that for all the other six
categories we can again describe in detail what we would want to do about them. In most cases they are considerably less far advanced than stem cell therapies are, though.” At
present, in terms of development each
category is at a different place along the road. Human trials are way off; in fact, for many of them the SENS Foundation isn’t yet at
the stage
where they are working with lab mice. “My foundation tends to focus on the most difficult, the earliest stage of development, largely because nobody else is,” Dr de Grey said. “These are the things that are too hard for other people to work on, but we care about the overall end goal and we’re making sure nothing gets neglected.
the experiences I’d had as a school child, when I’d seen stage hypnotist shows. “There was a similarity with an act where some
guy would be hypnotised and get up on stage and the first step would be that the hypnotist would tell
the subject something that wasn’t right hand, and their true and
they’d believe it. I remember one particular case where the person would be told that their left hand was their their
left. Then the hypnotist would say,
right hand was ‘now
please touch your left elbow with your right hand’ and the person wouldn’t be able to it. The hypnotist says ‘You couldn’t do it, could you?’ Up until this point it has been entertaining, but the real interest is what happens next: the hypnotist says to the subject, ‘Why couldn’t you do it?’ And the subject will always give a completely lucid, unhesitating explanation for why they couldn’t touch their left elbow with their right hand. Their explanation would be ridiculous – it would have some logical hole in it the size of Canada – but the subject won’t know this. So I realised I was seeing exactly this kind of reaction in people when I was having conversations about defeating ageing.” Given the ‘conditioning’ Dr de Grey describes it’s
easy to see why such reactions occur. And even if we get with the anti-ageing project, humans will always have a naturally insatiable curiosity about
“One hundred thousand people are dying every day from ageing, so every day I can bring forward the defeat of ageing I am saving 100,000 lives”
“Everybody who works with us is committed to
the idea of bringing ageing under medical control. Some people have had the trajectory of a scientific career and have been through PhD and post- doctoral work. Others have come in at an earlier stage, even before their undergraduate degree in one or two cases. On the admin and business side we have people who have had careers in the bio- tech industry, so it is quite a diverse range.” Given the hostility to the idea of anti-ageing,
those working for the SENS Foundation need such commitment. Dr de Grey describes the anti-ageing flat-earthers as people in a ‘pro-ageing trance’. “The reason I used the term is that 10 years ago or
more, when I was beginning to have conversations with people about the desirability of combating ageing, I found that people who meant well and I knew were completely rational and could talk about pretty much any other topic would completely lose it when we talked about this,” he says. “They would give answers to questions that one would be embarrassed to give to a child to shut them up, and I realised there was an eerie similarity to some of
www.projectsmagazine.eu.com
the existence of a 1,000-year-old man. What would he/she look like? What would they do, and how could the planet sustain a population of such longevity? “Well, they would look like and function as well
as a young adult today,” he says. “ However, I have no idea what else is going to happen in the next thousand years. The things that people ask or think about regarding a post-ageing world are things that can’t be answered because we are talking about a very, very distant future. We have to take into account other technological developments that we can’t even imagine. “There are certain solutions to problems we have
today which will emerge more readily as a result of all this. The main thing is empowerment. At the moment a lot of the reason we are so fatalistic about things like climate change and war and so on is that they ‘exist’ just as ageing exists, and if we consign one of these major problems to history, specifically ageing, that will give us much more confidence that we can consign the others to history as well.”
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