Mr. Immortality

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.”

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.

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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 supposedly prevailed on Zeus to allow her human lover Tithonus to live eternally—forgetting, unfortunately, to ask that he also not age into a dry old husk.

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, and now, with the publication of de Grey’s muchawaited Ending Aging, mere mortals can judge whether his proposals are “science or fantasy,” as the MIT magazine put it.

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 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 Dal