Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/393
21 #1 Fall 2008 Since then de Grey has appeared on 60 Minutes, e Colbert Report, and a Barbara Walters special report: "Live to be 150." He is chairman and chief science officer of the Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has raised $10,000,000. Among its activities, Methuselah of- fers prizes for major experimental break- throughs in aging using mice. De Grey's recent book, Ending Aging: e Rejuvenation Breakthroughs at Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime, is coauthored by Michael Rae, and published by St. Martin's Press. Michael Anissimov covered many of the basics about de Grey's theories in the previous article ("Engineering an End to Aging" – it really functions as an introduc- tory piece to this interview, so please take the time to read it). So rather than asking de Grey to regurgitate the basics of his the- ory one more time, I decided to probe his thinking on a few peripheral issues. H+: Are there still people who study aging that cling to the notion of a bio- logical clock, and do you think there's any possibility that new evidence might turn up for a more centralized mechanism leading to aging? AUBREY DE GREY: A small minor- ity of gerontologists do still propound the idea that aging is "programmed" in most or all species, yes. (Everyone accepts that it's programmed in a minority of species, those that age extremely fast after reproduction, such as salmon.) e widespread rejection of programmed aging is actually over fifty years old, dating back to a paper by Peter Medawar from 1952. Basically the main- stream view is that slow aging (of the sort we see in most species) can't be controlled by genes because the presence of those genes would give the species just the same life span and health span as it would have if it lacked those genes and had slightly less powerful inbuilt anti-aging machinery. is lack of a function of pro-aging machinery means that there would be no selection to maintain such machinery, so it would have mutated into oblivion even if it had ever existed. ere's really no chance that new evidence could overturn this. e only rea- son there's still any controversy is that there are a few rather artificial circumstances that at first sight seem to look like programmed aging – but closer inspection shows that they aren't really. H+: Does the fact that there are -- your account -- seven different causes of aging ever worry you, in the sense that there might be some frustration when one or two of those causes won't budge? ADG: ere are actually many more than seven – my seven strands are just cat- egories of damage, within each of which there are many examples. But still, sure, I think it's vital to get all of them fixed as soon as possible, because any one of them could kill us on its own. at's why my own work has historically focused on the hard- est strands. H+: What are these foci and what is happening with them? ADG: e three hardest aspects of SENS (at present – this could of course change!) are: the relocation of the mito- chondrial DNA to the nucleus to make mutations in the original mitochondrial Initially… journalists "knew" I must be crazy. More recently most journalists have begun to realize that what I'm saying is actually quite plausible…