It was 4 a.m. in Manhattan Beach, California, and Aubrey de Grey was knackered. Still, he couldn’t sleep, partly because his brain was stuck in the British time zone he had departed just yesterday, and partly because he was having a eureka moment. He had flown over from Cambridge and spent June 24, 2000, submerged in roundtable discussions and debates with gerontologists from all over the world. The subject of their discussion was to explore ways to combat aging—and frankly it had been insufferable. Despite all the brainstorming and scientific deliberations, the group had failed to come up with any kind of concrete antiaging plan.
So now he was pacing the room, pulling on his long, brown beard as he habitually did, mystified. How could one open the hood on human biology and tinker intelligently enough to fully stop the aging process? That was the big mystery of the day. This, even though the very next day Francis Collins and Craig Venter would stand with the president of the United States and announce the human genome had, at last, been sequenced. Despite that advance, Craig Venter was still of the opinion that no one knew “shit about biology.” And he was right. Everyone was still a long way from understanding how all the gears and switches of the human genome put every one of us six feet under.
Then came the eureka moment: a solution to aging, and it didn’t require redesigning the whole evolutionary masterworks. Instead, it was only necessary to identify the common damage that aging did to human biology. Once that was done, then one simply had to repair those particular elements in the way one repaired a car: Fix the brakes, replace the alternator, rebuild the transmission, and so on. By debugging the system, you could keep the amazing contraption running in top condition…indefinitely. After all, weren’t we really just these magnificent, if flawed, pieces of organic instrumentation? When you thought about it this way, living forever really was just an engineering problem.
De Grey felt he was a man who could identify these insights better than others. His first degree was in computer science and his second was a Ph.D. in biology. He had only just completed his doctoral thesis on how mitochondria, which power every one of the body’s cells, break down and obliterate our cellular works as they age. For years, while working his job computing at a genetics lab in Cambridge, he had pored over books in Trinity Hall’s biology libraries, absorbing the intricacies of biomedical gerontology, the study of how the body ages.
So now in his Manhattan Beach hotel, he sat down and furiously scribbled out a list of the ways that humans commonly broke down, and how they might be repaired: cells, neurons, mitochondria, the whole shebang. The key was not to look at aging as something natural, but as a disease, and then to cure it.
Before the sun rose, he had written it all out.
First, there was the mutation of chromosomes, which led to cancer. Then came glycation, the warping and disruption of proteins that glucose (sugar) caused. And there were the so-called “extracellular aggregates”—all the junk that accumulated outside the membranes of the body’s trillions of cells that, as we aged, increasingly failed to be properly cleaned up, like a house gone to seed. This included damage like beta-amyloid, which was related to Alzheimer’s. Next, de Grey identified intracellular aggregates, the goo that gummed up the works inside of cells over time: substances like lipofuscin, the so-called “wear and tear” pigments that damaged many major organs, eyes, and brains. Cellular senescence was another big problem. This happened when cells aged but didn’t entirely break down, creating those zombies that sent out misfired chemical signals and damaged their cellular neighbors. And finally, there was the depletion of the stem cells that drove the development of all humans in the womb and during childhood. De Grey knew the body tapped these cell reservoirs throughout life to renew heart or liver or collagen cells, but he also saw that stem cells aged over time, which made them less than the perfect replacements they were in youth. And of course, their supplies were not unlimited. When they were gone, they were gone. These were the six culprits that aged and unhinged us.
Unlike Kurzweil and Grossman, de Grey’s solutions to the problem of mortality imagined science making a series of incremental advancements in drug therapy that would extend the lives of still healthy people who hadn’t yet shown symptoms of the cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and other illnesses that so often accompanied aging. He was, in effect, proposing to find ways to do what the body does pretty well when it’s young, but slowly fails to do as we age.
De Grey didn’t pretend that his prescriptions would be perfect; they just had to be good enough to slow and eventually reverse aging so that people who remained healthy at 70 would live youthfully to 150, at which time more advances would allow them to live to 300 until still more came, and so forth. Somewhere along the line, the really Big Breakthroughs would reverse aging altogether. He called this theory “longevity escape velocity.” You would die, of course, eventually, because statistically something was going to get you: a bolt of lightning, abduction by aliens, a spouse who simply couldn’t stomach the idea of celebrating her 950th wedding anniversary with the same person. But for all intents and purposes, life everlasting was possible.
De Grey realized all of this was theoretical, and the remedies were a long way off. But as he sat in the cold dawn light, ransacking all of the research he had done, he was convinced that in the year 2000, scientists working in labs around the world were already making progress. Their efforts just needed to be more properly focused. For now, though, his next step was to work out the details of his insights, and reveal them to others within the biogerontological fold.
He was pretty sure they would conclude he had lost every one of his marbles.
AUBREY DE GREY was a piece of work. In the early 2000s, he seemed to have dropped out of the sky like some John the Baptist, reap-the-whirlwind desert prophet, rattling his staff and railing against traditional medical science. His gaunt face was hidden behind an immense, messianic beard, and a brown ponytail of wavy hair ran thickly down the middle of his back. His look and style was a 21st-century fusion of Rasputin and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—part brooding, part beatific, a man who understood secrets others could only hope to fathom.
And he had wit. When he gave talks, de Grey would open with questions like: “Hands up! Anyone in the audience in favor of malaria? Good! Because there is this characteristic that malaria shares with aging: It kills you!” He had a puckish way with words too, his elongated British elocutions punctuated by little verbal bombs like “It’s just bullshit!” or “That’s bollocks!” and “Bloody well stupid!”
But no one should be under the impression these lectures were simply out-and-out rants. De Grey was a scientist, in two separate fields. His first degree at University of Cambridge in computer science had landed him work with Sinclair Research Ltd., an artificial intelligence software company. His second scientific venture began when he ran into Adelaide Carpenter at a friend’s birthday party in Cambridge. Carpenter was a well-respected fruit fly geneticist on sabbatical from the University of California at San Diego. She was 19 years older than de Grey, but they got married anyway. During their long conversations over breakfast and dinner de Grey began to interrogate his new wife about her investigations into the biology of genetics.
“Was anyone working on aging?” he would ask.
“No,” she would reply.
“Why not?”
“Because it was wicked hard to study and nobody is going to tackle it. They wouldn’t know where to begin.”
Well, that was just too delicious a problem. So de Grey forsook his former job and took up gerontology while handling software development and bioinformatics at the Cambridge genetics lab where Adelaide and her students worked. Over the next several years he would harangue Adelaide for information, pore over textbooks and journals, pester biologists with every kind of question, and show up at conferences to interrogate anyone he could find.
Despite becoming a gerontologist, de Grey didn’t care much for others in the field. For decades, since the days when gerontology had first emerged in the 1950s, scientists tended to view the aged as some disconnected group of peanut-gallery aliens known as “old people.” De Grey likened gerontologists to geologists who thoughtfully reviewed the Richter scale readouts of disastrous earthquakes but did nothing about stopping the destruction itself. Well, bollocks! He didn’t want to simply witness the process of aging. He wanted to halt it!
Nevertheless, de Grey began writing papers in respected journals like BioEssays and the Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine and Experimental Gerontology. He visited conferences and roundtables in Cambridge and Los Angeles and Chicago, and joined scientific societies like the American Aging Association and British Society for Research on Ageing. After all, one had to observe all the appropriate proprieties if one hoped to have an academic hearing.
In 2000, after de Grey completed his Ph.D. and the “eureka” moment had struck, he encapsulated his thinking in his first book, Ending Aging, with co-author Michael Rae. When it was published in 2007, he was suddenly everywhere because he was just what mainstream media loved: frank to a fault, articulate, credentialed, and exotic. The Wall Street Journal wrote, “If even one of [de Grey’s] proposals works, it could mean years of extended healthy living.” In 2010, Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Weiner was so captured by de Grey’s persona that he wrote a whole book, entitled Long for This World about the man and his revolutionary quests. De Grey’s TED Talks hit numbers that clocked in at the millions. He was even interviewed on 60 Minutes, sitting under the lights opposite Morley Safer, expostulating on the possibility of immortality, stroking his great beard and explaining how he had worked out his prescriptions for everlasting life—or as he liked to put it, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, or SENS.
Part of what caught on about de Grey was his straightforward analysis of aging. He was really the first person to come right out and say that it wasn’t heart disease or cancer or Alzheimer’s that were making us old; it was the opposite. Aging was what broke down hearts, bones, and organs; it accelerated cancer and crippled brains. The diseases that plagued most of us were just aging’s side effects. Aging was the mother of all diseases. And if that was the case, why were scientists twiddling their academic thumbs solving diseases one by one, when it would be far smarter to get to the root of the problem—or, more accurately, the seven problems he had laid out that morning in Manhattan Beach? Did we not see that every day 100,000 people were dying from age-related diseases? Two-thirds of the human race. At his talks, he would throw his hands up and rail. We are talking about millions of lives here!
In 2007, this was a radically different view of aging. Even as Ray Kurzweil was honing his ideas on age prevention with Terry Grossman, even while Art Levinson continued to grow Genentech into a bigger, more successful biotechnology juggernaut than it already was, and even as Craig Venter was figuring out how to create the first artificial form of life, almost no one viewed aging the way de Grey did—as a lethal disability with a mortality rate of 100 percent. Kurzweil himself called de Grey the most energetic and insightful advocate for eliminating aging out there.
AROUND THIS TIME, de Grey became linked, by an unlikely route, with Craig Venter. The editor of MIT Technology Review, Jason Pontin, asked Venter if he would sit on a small scientific committee whose job would be to review papers that refuted Aubrey de Grey’s claims that aging could be cured. They were calling it the SENS Challenge. Technology Review was a magazine read regularly by the geekerati, so the request carried real weight in the scientific world.
Venter had heard of de Grey but wasn’t necessarily a fan. He felt the man mostly fulminated, rather than accomplishing any actual science. Nevertheless, the MIT articles that had led to the challenge bothered him. Pontin’s pieces in the magazine clearly showed he didn’t care for de Grey’s views, and to Venter, this felt like the magazine might be railroading the man, or at least trying to marginalize him. Venter didn’t care for that. He knew a thing or two about being railroaded and marginalized.
The challenge had its origins in an earlier article Pontin had commissioned about de Grey in 2004, when he dispatched Sherwin Nuland to Cambridge to put de Grey under the microscope. Nuland, Pontin figured, was the perfect man for the job. He was a physician and professor of surgery at Yale’s School of Medicine, and an expert on medical history and bioethics. His best-selling book, How We Die, had won the National Book Award in 1994. If anyone was capable of disarming de Grey’s outlandish views on mortality, Pontin felt it would be Nuland.
Soon Nuland found himself jetting across the Atlantic and spending hours at de Grey’s favorite drinking hole, the Eagle, a 350-year-old pub where Francis Crick and James Watson themselves had spent their youthful, pre–Nobel laureate days downing a pint or two as they plumbed the mysteries of deoxyribonucleic acid. De Grey personally preferred drinking Abbot Ale, which he saw as a kind of elixir—the wellspring of his boundless energy and intellectual creativity. That’s how he put it.
A thoughtful debate ensued. Nuland wasn’t so much interested in the bearded man’s remedies for aging as he was concerned with the notion of a planet filled to brimming with humans who never died, never had children, and eventually became all the same age. As he saw it, those would be the inevitable results of a world where radical life extension was common.
De Grey said he understood those concerns, and he could see why people came up with the elaborate rationalizations they did to explain death’s inevitability: Knowing I’ll die in the future gives meaning to the present. There is a heaven and eternal life after death. I’ll live on in my children or my achievements. I’ll come back reincarnated as a better man or woman (but hopefully not a toad or bottle fly). These thoughts helped people make peace with death, rather than obsessing over the miserable inevitability of The End. What bugged him was the way in which all the objections to long life were raised. If science one day came up with a cure for cancer, he said, the world would sing its praises to the rafters. But suggest that we should eliminate aging? That was heresy!
In de Grey’s view, staying alive—even indefinitely—was a straightforward extension of the “duty-of-care” concept that went all the way back to common law. This simply meant we should care for others if it was possible to help them avoid harm. If someone lived longer because of a new drug, were you going to take away their diabetes medicine or beta-blockers? Why didn’t the same hold true for aging?
That was a good point, but in Nuland’s view, not good enough. He said so officially several months later when he wrote his New Yorker–style story for Technology Review. His assessment was eloquent, and in some ways complimentary, but ultimately dismissive, even chilling.
Personal desires, Nuland said, needed to be balanced with the needs of the rest of humanity—and these were best served by dying when our individual time came. In the end, Nuland concluded that de Grey was dangerous, maybe delusional. It wasn’t that he was some insane dictator or rogue menace, humanity’s Green Goblin or Lex Luthor. It was more complicated than that. He was a benevolent soul, well meaning and agreeable, who would absolutely immolate the species, all with nothing but our very best interests at heart.
When Nuland’s article appeared, something astounding happened: It became one of Technology Review’s most popular pieces ever. But the irony was, readers weren’t nearly as taken with Nuland’s insights as they were fascinated by de Grey’s ideas for life everlasting. Pontin hadn’t seen that coming.
That was when the SENS Challenge emerged and Craig Venter got involved. Venter had been plenty busy in the years following the completion of the Human Genome Project. By 2008, Time had counted him among the 100 most influential people in the world, twice. In June 2005, Venter founded Synthetic Genomics Inc., and then immediately took his newest yacht, Sorcerer II, on a globe-encircling expedition to explore the fundamental processes of marine microbes. He felt there were secrets to be revealed in the millions of ancient and invisible creatures that had evolved over billions of years in the world’s oceans. Later, in 2010, he and his team would create the very first synthetic life-form at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), another of his scientific ventures. Up to that day, every form of life that had ever existed on Earth had been honed in the crucibles of natural selection—but Venter’s team created an entirely new form of life they would call Mycoplasma laboratorium. It was a remarkable feat, and made headlines worldwide.
But again, that would come later. For now, Venter willingly joined the five referees for the SENS Challenge, which included other heavy hitters like Rodney Brooks, the founder of iRobot and Roomba, and Nathan Myhrvold, formerly one of Bill Gates’s top advisers. Together, Technology Review and de Grey’s own Methuselah Foundation agreed to launch a $20,000 prize that would reward any scientist working in the field of biology who could prove that de Grey’s thinking was so wrong it was “unworthy of learned” debate.
In the end, Venter and the other judges decided the challengers had not made their cases, and de Grey won. Or at least he didn’t lose. Venter, though he was pretty certain de Grey was not the knight errant of everlasting life, felt that supporting de Grey’s point of view at least ensured that those who thought outside the box could get a shot at being heard and debated. That’s what science needed. Maybe de Grey’s prescriptions for longevity escape velocity or engineered negligible senescence made sense; maybe they didn’t. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to do the experiment!
Soon enough, there would be plenty of those to follow.