|
|
|
|
|
The Invincible Man Joel Garreau Aubrey de Grey may be wrong but, evidence suggests, he's not nuts. This is a no small assertion. De Grey argues that some people alive today will live in a robust and youthful fashion for 1,000 years. In 2005, an authoritative publication offered $20,000 to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that de Grey's plan for treating aging as a disease -- and curing it -- was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate." Now mere mortals -- who may wish to be significantly less mortal -- can judge whether de Grey's proposals are "science or fantasy," as the magazine put it. De Grey's much-awaited "Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime" has just been published.
The judges were formidable for that MIT Technology Review challenge prize. They included Rodney Brooks, then director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft; and J. Craig Venter, who shares credit for first sequencing the human genome. In the end, they decided no scientist had succeeded in blowing de Grey out of the water. "At issue is the conflict between the scientific process and the ambiguous status of ideas that have not yet been subjected to that process," Myhrvold wrote for the judges. Well yes, that. Plus the question that has tantalized humans forever. What if the only certainty is taxes? * * * Dodging death has long been a dream. Our earliest recorded legend is that of Gilgamesh, who finds and loses the secret of immortality. The Greek goddess Eos prevails on Zeus to allow her human lover Tithonus to live eternally, forgetting, unfortunately, to ask that he also not become aged and frail. He winds up such a dried husk she turns him into a grasshopper. In "It Ain't Necessarily So," Ira Gershwin writes: Methus'lah lived nine hundred years Methus'lah lived nine hundred years But who calls dat livin' when no gal'll give in To no man what's nine hundred years. Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, 44, recently of Britain's Cambridge University, advocates not myth but "strategies for engineering negligible senescence," or SENS. It means curing aging. With adequate funding, de Grey thinks scientists may, within a decade, triple the remaining life span of late-middle-age mice. The day this announcement is made, he believes, the news will hit people like a brick as they realize that their cells could be next. He speculates people will start abandoning risky jobs, such as being police officers, or soldiers. De Grey's looks are almost as striking as his ambitions. His slightly graying chestnut hair is swept back into a ponytail. His russet beard falls to his belly. His mustache -- as long as a hand -- would have been the envy of Salvador Dali. When he talks about people soon putting a higher premium on health than wealth, he twirls the ends of his mustache back behind his ears, murmuring, "So many women, so much time." A little over six feet tall and lean -- he weighs 147 pounds, the same as in his teenage years -- de Grey shows up in a denim work shirt open to the sternum, ripped jeans and scuffed sneakers, looking for all the world like a denizen of Silicon Valley. Not far from the mark. De Grey's original academic field is computer science and artificial intelligence. He has become the darling of some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who think changing the world is all in a day's work. Peter Thiel, the co-founder and former CEO of PayPal -- who sold it in 2002 for $1.5 billion, pocketing $55 million himself -- has dropped $3.5 million on de Grey's Methuselah Foundation. "I thought he had this rare combination -- a serious thinker who had enough courage to break with the crowd," Thiel says. "A lot of people who are not conventional are not serious. But the real breakthroughs in science are made by serious thinkers who are willing to work on research areas that people think are too controversial or too implausible." At midday in George Washington University's Kogan Plaza off H Street NW, you are surrounded by firm, young flesh. Muscular young men saunter by in sandals, T-shirts and cargo shorts. Young blond women sport clingy, sleeveless tops, oversize sunglasses and the astounding array of subtle variations available in flip-flops and painted toenails. Is this the future? you ask de Grey. "Yes, it is precisely the future," he says. "Except without people who look as old as you and me." "Of course the world will be completely different in all manner of ways," de Grey says of the next few decades. His speech is thick, fast and mellifluous, with a quality British accent. "If we want to hit the high points, number one is, there will not be any frail elderly people. Which means we won't be spending all this unbelievable amount of money keeping all those frail elderly people alive for like one extra year the way we do at the moment. That money will be available to spend on important things like, well, obviously, providing the health care to keep us that way, but that won't be anything like so expensive. Secondly, just doing the things we can't afford now, giving people proper education and not just when they're kids, but also proper adult education and retraining and so on. "Another thing that's going to have to change completely is retirement. For the moment, when you retire, you retire forever. We're sorry for old people because they're going downhill. There will be no real moral or sociological requirement to do that. Sure, there is going to be a need for Social Security as a safety net just as there is now. But retirement will be a periodic thing. You'll be a journalist for 40 years or whatever and then you'll be sick of it and you'll retire on your savings or on a state pension, depending on what the system is. So after 20 years, golf will have lost its novelty value, and you'll want to do something else with your life. You'll get more retraining and education, and go and be a rock star for 40 years, and then retire again and so on." The mind reels. Will we want to be married to the same person for a thousand years? Will we need religion anymore? Will the planet fill to overflowing? But first -- why are these questions coming up now? And why are we listening to answers from Aubrey de Grey?
|
||||
