Can Human Mortality Really Be Hacked?
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INNOVATION
Can Human Mortality Really Be Hacked?
Backed by the digital fortunes of Silicon Valley, biotech companies are brazenly setting out to “cure” aging
Elmo Keep
June 2017
Aubrey de Grey says, “There’s no such thing as aging gracefully.”
Aubrey de Grey says, “There’s no such thing as aging gracefully.” Timothy Archibald
It’s just after 10:30 a.m. on a pleasant weekday morning at SENS, a biotech lab in Mountain View, California. I’ve come to speak to its chief science officer, Aubrey de Grey. I find him sitting in his office, cracking open a bottle of Stone pale ale. “Would you like one?” he offers hospitably. De Grey drinks three or four pints of ale a day, and swears it hasn’t kept him from maintaining the same vigor he felt as a teenager in London.
Now the 54-year-old’s long hair, tied back in a ponytail, is turning gray, a change that would be unremarkable if he weren’t one of the world’s most outspoken proponents of the idea that aging can be completely eradicated. De Grey first gained notoriety in 1999 for his book The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, in which he argued that immortality was theoretically possible. Since then, he’s been promoting his ideas from prominent platforms—the BBC, the pages of Wired, the TED stage. He delivers his message in seemingly unbroken paragraphs, stroking his dark brown wizard’s beard, which reaches below his navel. Unlike most scientists, he isn’t shy about making bold speculations. He believes, for example, that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old has most likely already been born.
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