Why aubrey de grey is wrong

Over the past years, life expectancy has been steadily increasing by two years every decade. One way of looking at this is that for every hour that passes you have gained 12 minutes more life. Some think this life 'dividend' will tail off, others that it can be sustained.

Yet others - de Grey among them - argue it can be increased until we tip the balance and begin to gain more than 60 minutes for every 60 that pass. De Grey has created a detailed agenda and believes that, if followed, it will give us a chance of catching up with ageing in the next 25 years.

Such notions put him squarely at odds with most of the gerontology establishment, who believe his claims are so wild they undermine their much less headline-grabbing research into how the body ages and what might be done to make the last years of life more comfortable. It is important, de Grey says, to think about the difference between ageing and dying. At present most people die from illnesses that are caused, or made fatal, by the gradual decay of our bodies.

For example, pneumonia kills many of the elderly people who catch it, but few of its young victims. Also, few young people suffer heart attacks or cancer because their bodies have deteriorated less.

Identifying seven areas of cellular decay we need to tackle, SENS predicts that, through as yet un- or semi-developed processes such as repairing or replacing worn-out body parts, flushing out the poisons that build up in our cells or preventing the growth of cancers our bodies will no longer wear out in the way they currently do.

Accidents, murder and suicide would still be able to kill us, but with actuaries calculating that a fatal accident comes our way on average once every 1, years, our life spans would be massively increased. It's a balmy early autumn night, and de Grey is making his radical claims to me in the quad next to the Queen's College bar.

Two days into the conference and plus attendees from different disciplines, and from across the globe, mill around, swapping anecdotes and ideas. De Grey is engaging, funny, likeable and highly intelligent, but when he wants to ram his point home he can be extremely provocative.

He begins with some maths: ', people die every day worldwide and of those people, two-thirds die of ageing one way or another. Those are 30 World Trade Centres every day, and if I bring forward the cure for ageing by one day I've saved , lives.

De Grey was born and brought up in Cambridge. He never knew his father. His mother was an artist who hothoused the young Aubrey in her weak points - science and mathematics. One curious fact struck the young de Grey: 'It was completely obvious to me that ageing was a bad thing, and also that ageing must, in principle, be fixable.

But the people I came into contact with seemed to think that there might be something good about ageing, that it would be dangerous to mess with it, or, even worse, that it was completely inevitable. I disagree. We are machines, and ageing is the wearing out of a machine, the accumulation of damage to a machine, and hence potentially fixable. But when he met and married a professor of biology, Adelaide Carpenter, his interest in ageing was reawakened.

In he made himself the first gerontological 'theorist' by reading the field's journals and textbooks and attending conferences. He did no lab work and did not apply for grants; he simply observed the subject. This position is common in physics - Stephen Hawking and Einstein are examples - but less so in biology. Two months after he began teaching himself, de Grey wrote a speculation on the accumulation of mutations in the mitochondria the generators that power our cells, which produce the free radicals that contribute to much of the deterioration of our bodies.

His paper cleared up a problem that had frustrated researchers for years. Mitochondria have their own DNA - separate from the chromasomes which reside in the nucleus - and these suffer mutations. For years researchers believed the mutations were responsible for cellular decay, but couldn't make the experimental evidence tally with the theory.

De Grey's paper brought the two together. De Grey's Norman name and hippyish figure became well known on the gerontology circuit of journals, meetings and conferences. Despite being patronised for not having done any lab work 'He doesn't know one end of a pipette from another,' one anonymous declaimer told me his comments were still relevant and intelligent.

Cambridge University awarded him a PhD in biology in He became an accepted, if fringe, member of the scene. The process of ageing has three stages. The state of chemical flux of our bodies metabolism gradually causes damage to the ,bn cells in our bodies deterioration which leads to pathology disease and illness.

It sounds bonkers but de Grey's theories have gained him some high-profile supporters in Silicon Valley, the super-rich tech enclave in northern California that is home to more middle-aged billionaires than anywhere else on the planet. Senescence is scientific jargon for ageing. While many academics mock him, in age-obsessed California de Grey now regularly breaks bread and funds his research with donations from some of the sharpest minds in the world, including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin who has talked of 'curing death' and Larry Ellison, of Oracle, who are all showing an interest in gerontology, or the study of ageing.

Google's Bill Maris, who heads the computer giant's investment arm, said: 'We have tools in the life sciences to achieve anything you have the audacity to envision. I hope to live long enough not to die. He's become something of a controversial cheerleader for a generation of tech billionaires who have made their fortunes and now, of course, want to live for ever.

He spent the remainder on a 'very nice house'. He never knew his father and became fascinated by seeking a cure for ageing while still at Harrow. Scroll down for video. Anyone who has ever wanted to change the world has been attacked.

Gandhi said first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you and then they say, "We were with you all along". De Grey's radical thesis is that ageing can be halted and even reversed by treating the human body like a vintage car — 'replace the parts, clean it up, keep it running smoothly way past its expected expiration date'.

His argument is that cellular decay causes ageing, illness and, ultimately, death, and that technologies being developed now and inventions in the future will allow us to repair and replace damaged body parts at a cellular level — leading to virtual immortality. People will still die in accidents and from suicide, 'but there is no reason that someone living today shouldn't live to , 1, years. As the technologies improve, lifespans will increase', says de Grey.

He believes the first person who will live to be 1, has already been born, and cites research that has dramatically extended the lives of mice, worms and fruit flies as proof science is 'catching up' with his theories that therapies which will genetically alter, replace and repair the cells in our bodies will be the key to eternal life. He accuses the majority of us of being in a 'pro-ageing trance', content to accept ageing and death as inevitable, while the reality is that technology will, within two decades, he says, have advanced far enough that we can replace and repair faulty genes, 'clear out the gunk around cells' and rejuvenate our bodies.

It sounds fanciful but as he talks, it is clear that de Grey is empowered by the support of the Silicon Valley billionaires. Many academics have dismissed his theories as pie in the sky. It should be noted that much of what he says is theoretical and, critics point out, de Grey has never actually done any practical lab work. De Grey and his biologist wife Adelaide pictured have an unconventional marriage and he admits to having 'two younger girlfriends'.

Nir Barsilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said: 'Based on the biology that we know today, somewhere between and there is a roof in play and I challenge if we can get beyond it. De Grey has been mockingly compared to a 'Messiah' figure because of his flowing facial hair, and heads turn in the airport bar as he bangs his glass on the table and loudly pronounces that ', people die every day worldwide and of those people, two-thirds die of ageing one way or another.

That's 30 World Trade Centers every day. Rather, he was in it to gain access to underage girls in order to molest and rape them. The jews do not pick these creepy celebrities by random chance; they always go for the scum, for the dregs, for the purulent detritus cluttered underneath the rotting corpses of all White countries subverted by jews. The jews promote the most perverted con-artists; after all, it takes one to know one, and the jews sure do know how to accurately identify prospective candidates for leading their shill movements.

The one and only litmus test, it seems, is sexual predation. From the news report :. Halioua and Deming wrote about their experiences with de Grey on their Twitter accounts and personal websites, and asserted they fall into part of a larger pattern of harassment and toxicity surrounding de Grey and SENS.

Deming says she first came in contact with de Grey when she was around 14 years old. As an aspiring scientist, she emailed several prominent figures seeking advice for how to break into the field, and de Grey was among the recipients.

He served as an informal mentor to her, and they reconnected later when he interviewed her for a fellowship program. In her post, she added that instances like these made her consider leaving the field on multiple occasions. To anyone with even half a brain, none of this comes as a surprise; not a single element here is in any way shocking.

These agents of the jews all act the same. This is all part of the jewish program of promoting pedophile rapists into positions of power, both to control them and to advance the cause of normalizing such vile behavior, legitimizing the illegitimate. Aubrey has always been a shill — he was put there to promote kosher narratives about the sanctity of the medical and pharmaceutical establishments. But you would be wrong. Aubrey de Grey's life extension diet emphasizes the importance of beer.

He dresses like a shabby graduate student and affects Rip Van Winkle's beard; he has no children; he has few interests outside the science of biogerontology; he drinks too much beer. How Beer , Oprah and Sergey Brin can help cure aging [6].