Interview
a16z Podcast | Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey
- Aubrey de Grey clarifies that his primary objective is curing ill health (gerontology), with increased longevity serving as a side effect rather than a direct pursuit of immortality.
- De Grey transitioned from software verification and artificial intelligence to gerontology after realizing the biological community largely neglected aging as a solvable problem.
- His transition occurred around 2000 while working on a bioinformatics project at the University of Cambridge, which allowed him to conduct aging research in his spare time.
- De Grey introduced the "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS) framework, which shifts the focus from slowing metabolic damage to the periodic repair of accumulated cellular damage.
- He identifies seven distinct categories of aging damage, noting that any single category is sufficient to cause death if left unrepaired.
- For the category of cell loss (e.g., Parkinson's disease), de Grey advocates for stem cell therapy, which is currently the most advanced SENS-related therapy in clinical trials.
- The strategy for repairing oxidized cholesterol (atherosclerosis) involves using bacterial enzymes to break down the toxin, a concept proven via proof-of-concept in 2012.
- De Grey spent the first five years of his biological work (late 1990s) publishing data interpretations before facing significant opposition to his core repair hypotheses around 2000.
- He argues that the peer review funding system stifles high-risk, high-reward, and cross-disciplinary research by favoring incremental, reputation-safe projects.
- De Grey views the SENS approach and Ray Kurzweil's technological singularity as a "race" rather than a competition, with both sharing the goal of extending the human lifespan.
- He outlines three "bridges" to longevity: current biomedical interventions, SENS-style high-tech biotechnology for damage repair, and future non-biological solutions like uploading consciousness.
- De Grey rejects the "overpopulation" objection to longevity, citing forecasts by the International Futures group which suggest population growth will not outpace technological increases in planetary carrying capacity.
- He attributes rising carrying capacity to advancements in renewable energy, nuclear fusion, and artificial meat production.
- While acknowledging rapid advances in genomics (sequencing) and genome editing (CRISPR), de Grey warns that data acquisition alone does not constitute a cure without the underlying theoretical framework.
- De Grey expresses a sentimental preference for biological existence ("made out of meat") but accepts non-biological longevity solutions if they arrive before biological ones do.