Towards 1,000 Year Life Expectancies

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

The Times Online looks at the work of Aubrey de Grey: "Dr de Grey is trying to end human ageing. End it, or, as he describes his mission, 'to engineer huge gains in human life span'. Huge gains as in a 1,000-year life span, and a healthy 1,000 years at that. Huge gains as in the reversal of ageing in those already considered old. Huge gains as in the end of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and Alzheimer's. ... People really go into a sort of pro-ageing trance when you start talking about radically extending life. It's as if they'd rather defend something they think they know – that life span is finite – than deal with ageing itself as a disease and as something to be defeated. Isn't that amazing? Can you believe it? ... He has just published a book, Ending Aging, which has earned good marks from some of his peers. He is constantly on the road, speaking far and wide to large audiences. This week he is holding his third conference on what he calls SENS, or 'strategically engineered negligible senescence', in Cambridge; it will be attended by some of the leading lights of modern gerontology, pathology and cell biology. ... Last year Peter Thiel, the American founder of PayPal, the money transfer service, committed himself to a $3 million matching donation. The Methuselah Prize, that de Grey started a few years ago to reward anyone who could double the life span of a laboratory mouse, now stands at $4.4 million."

Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/features/article2400692.ece