The Guardian Interviews Aubrey de Grey

From the Guardian: "What's so wrong with getting old? It is simply that people get sick when they get older. I don't often meet people who want to suffer cardiovascular disease or whatever, and we get those things as a result of the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage. This is harmless at low levels but eventually it causes the diseases and disabilities of old age - which most people don't think are any fun. Is this the biggest health crisis facing the world? Absolutely. If we look at the industrialised world, basically 90% of all deaths are caused by ageing. They are deaths from causes that affect older people and don't affect young adults. And if we look at the whole world, then the number of deaths that occur each day is roughly 150,000 and about two-thirds of them are because of ageing. ... People have been trying to claim that we can defeat ageing since the dawn of time, and they haven't been terribly successful; there is a tendency to think there is some sort of inevitability about ageing - it somehow transcends our technological abilities in principle, which is complete nonsense. And when people have made their peace with this ghastly thing that is going to happen to them at some time in the distant future, they tend to be rather reluctant to re-engage the question when someone comes along with a new idea."

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/01/aubrey-de-grey-ageing-research

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