Gerontologist at the University of Cambridge (England), Aubrey de Gray is much talked about in the profession, the man seeking to make a biological revolution. This is not about seeking immortality, but about eliminating a specific cause of death, namely aging.
Gerontology concerns the study of human aging, its causes and consequences. Within this community, Aubrey de Grey, gerontologist at the University of Cambridge, England, and co-founder of the foundation Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), based in California, is making a lot of noise with a particular fight. Indeed, the man, accompanied by many researchers, seeks to establish a real biological revolution which will see humans live several hundred years.
» The first thing I would like is for us to stop using this word, ‘immortality’. It is not only wrong, it is harmful. Immortality means there is no chance of dying from any cause – whereas I seek to eliminate a specific cause of death, namely aging. And this term is symbolically strong, it makes people believe that this quest has moral issues and is technologically fanciful. he told Motherboard magazine. For him, the probability that the first person who will escape the damage of aging has already been born is around 80%.
This is not simply to suppress aging, but rather to prevent it from winning its fight against the human body. His teams are currently working on the development of a therapy that stimulates the immune system so that it identifies and eliminates cells that no longer reproduce, and replaces them with healthy cells that regenerate tissue. Thus, the service life is extended exponentially. » The therapies we are currently working on will not be perfect. But they will be effective enough to take middle-aged people, say 60, and rejuvenate them enough that they are not 60 (biologically) until they are 90 (chronologically) . That means we’ll have another 30 years to find a way to make them even younger, when they’re 90, so that they don’t biologically turn 60 for the third time before they turn 120 or 150. And I believe that 30 years will be more than enough to achieve this he explains.
Rather than seeking to prevent aging from gaining the metabolism, it is a question of letting this damage appear and then repairing it regularly, so that it is never serious enough to cause pathologies. Aubrey De Gray affirms that the knowledge and technologies to achieve such a result already exist, and that it is only a question of time before being able to apply them to living organisms, between six and eight years. » We still have to go step by step, but the main breakthrough, in terms of publicity, will come when we are able to rejuvenate mice in the laboratory. Once we can do this with mice, people will realize that it’s only a matter of time before we can do this with human beings. This is what we want to strive for, and we have a good chance of achieving it in the next six to eight years,” he concludes.
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