The Guardian interviews biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey: "The therapies he talks about will not be targeting the things that go wrong at the end of life - the degenerative diseases and loss of motor function - but their precursors, the changes that occur throughout life but which are manifested most devastatingly in old age. ... We've spent the last few millennia aware that senescence is horrible but knowing nevertheless that it's inevitable. We've had to find some mechanism to put it out of our minds so we can get on with our miserably short lives. There's nothing wrong with making the best of one's declining years, but what does annoy me is the fatalism. Now that we're seriously in range of finding therapies that actually work against ageing, this apathy, of course, becomes an enormous part of the problem."
Link: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,,1741195,00.html