Aubrey de Grey in AARP

I have been patiently waiting for the AARP magazine's piece on Aubrey de Grey to become available online; finally, here it is: "Viewing old age as an 'engineering system failure' (and the phrase 'successful aging' as a contradiction in terms), Aubrey leapfrogged the ambiguous medical questions that paralyzed his peers and went straight to fix-it solutions. 'We don't have to understand the weather to repair the roof after a storm,' he insists with the bravado that drives his critics nuts. Aubrey dubbed his seven-step strategy SENS, which stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. It consists of seven baseline causes of aging, dealing with general types of cellular damage, and offers repair methods for each. Eliminate that cellular damage and, he believes, we could live to 125 and beyond in disease-free bodies that simply do not age. ... He has many credible defenders, including Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who has called him 'highly visionary.' Even scientists who staunchly refute SENS, such as renowned University of Illinois at Chicago scientist S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D. (who duked it out with Aubrey last year on CBS's 60 Minutes), cannot deny the benefits of his rabble-rousing. 'Ideas are the currency of science,' Olshansky says. 'Aubrey is developing an important currency, which I really appreciate. He's getting research scientists to think outside the box."

Link: http://www.aarpmagazine.org/health/big_idea_long-distance_living.html

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