Aubrey de Grey

Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey (/dəˈɡreɪ/; born 20 April 1963)[4][5] is an English author and biomedical gerontologist.[6][7][8][9] He is the author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007). He is known for his view that medical technology may enable human beings alive today not to die from age-related causes.[10] As an amateur mathematician, he has contributed to the study of the Hadwiger–Nelson problem in geometric graph theory, making the first progress on the problem in over 60 years.[11]

Aubrey de Grey
De Grey in 2018
Born
Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey

(1963-04-20) 20 April 1963
London, England
NationalityBritish
EducationHarrow School
Alma materTrinity Hall, Cambridge
(BA, PhD - honorary)
OccupationAdjunct professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology[1]
Known for
Spouse
Adelaide Carpenter
​
​
(m. 1991; div. 2017)​
[2][3]

De Grey is an international adjunct professor of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology,[12] a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America,[13] the American Aging Association, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.[14] He has been interviewed in recent years in a number of news sources, including CBS 60 Minutes, the BBC, The Guardian, Fortune Magazine, The Washington Post, TED, Popular Science, Playboy, The Colbert Report, Time, the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, and The Joe Rogan Experience. He was the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation, but was fired in August 2021 after allegedly interfering in a probe investigating sexual harassment allegations against him.[15]

Early life and education

De Grey was born and brought up in London, England.[16] He told The Observer that he never knew his father, and that his mother Cordelia, an artist, encouraged him in the areas in which she herself was weakest: science and mathematics.[17] De Grey was educated at Sussex House School[18] and Harrow School. He attended university at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in computer science in 1985.[19]

Career

After graduation in 1985, de Grey joined Sinclair Research as an artificial intelligence researcher and software engineer. In 1986, he co-founded Man-Made Minions Ltd to pursue the development of an automated formal program verifier. At a graduate party in Cambridge, de Grey met fruit fly geneticist Adelaide Carpenter whom he would later marry. Through her he was introduced to the intersection of biology and programming when her boss needed someone who knew about computers and biology to take over the running of a database on fruit flies.[20] He educated himself in biology by reading journals and textbooks, attending conferences, and being tutored by Professor Carpenter.[21][22] From 1992 to 2006, he was in charge of software development at the university's Genetics Department for the FlyBase genetic database.[23]

Cambridge awarded de Grey an honorary Ph.D. by publication in biology on 9 December 2000.[19][24] The degree was based on his 1999 book The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, in which de Grey wrote that obviating damage to mitochondrial DNA might by itself extend lifespan significantly, though he said it was more likely that cumulative damage to mitochondria is a significant cause of senescence, but not the single dominant cause.

Strategies

In 2005, de Grey argued that most of the fundamental knowledge needed to develop effective anti-aging medicine already existed, and that the science is ahead of the funding. He described his work as identifying and promoting specific technological approaches to the reversal of various aspects of aging, or, as de Grey put it, "... the set of accumulated side effects from Metabolism that eventually kills us."[25]

Aubrey de Grey explaining the SENS approach in a talk

As of 2005, de Grey's work centered on a detailed plan called strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS), which is aimed at preventing age-related physical and cognitive decline. In March 2009, he co-founded the SENS Research Foundation (named SENS Foundation until early 2013), a non-profit organisation based in California, United States, where he served until 2021 as Chief Science Officer. The foundation "works to develop, promote and ensure widespread access to regenerative medicine solutions to the disabilities and diseases of aging,"[26] focusing on the strategies for engineered negligible senescence. Before March 2009, the SENS research program was mainly pursued by the Methuselah Foundation, co-founded by de Grey.

A major activity of the Methuselah Foundation is the Methuselah Mouse Prize,[27] a prize designed to incentivize research into effective life extension interventions by awarding monetary prizes to researchers who stretch the lifespan of mice to unprecedented lengths. De Grey stated in March 2005 "if we are to bring about real regenerative therapies that will benefit not just future generations, but those of us who are alive today, we must encourage scientists to work on the problem of aging." The prize reached 4.2 USD million in February 2007.

In 2007, de Grey wrote the book Ending Aging with the assistance of Michael Rae.[28]

In a 2008 broadcast on Franco-German TV network Arte, de Grey claimed that the first human to live 1,000 years was probably already alive, and might even be between 50 and 60 years old already.[29]

In 2012, de Grey inherited a considerable fortune of more than US$16 million, US$13 million of which he donated to the SENS Research Foundation.[30]

In 2022, de Grey started a new foundation and announced this at the Longevity Summit in Dublin. The board of directors include Greg Grinberg as Executive Chair, Daria Khaltourina, Martin O’Dea (also Events Director), Gennady Stolyarov and David Wood.[31]

Mathematics

On 8 April 2018, de Grey posted a paper to arXiv explicitly constructing a unit-distance graph in the plane that cannot be colored with fewer than five colors, increasing the previously known lower bound by one. The previous lower bound of four was due to the problem's original proposal in 1950 by Hugo Hadwiger and Edward Nelson.[32] De Grey's graph has 1581 vertices, but it has since been reduced to 510 vertices by independent researchers.[33][34][35]

AgeX Therapeutics

De Grey was formerly Vice President of New Technology Discovery at AgeX Therapeutics, a startup in the longevity space helmed by Michael D. West, PhD. De Grey was appointed to the position within the company in July 2017.[36][37][38]

Personal views

Outlook on the future of anti-aging medicine

Aubrey de Grey coined the term Methuselarity, which he defines as the moment when medical therapies will rejuvenate people enough to continue living healthily until the next improved generation of rejuvenation biotechnology, and so on, indefinitely. According to de Grey, that is synonymous with the point where science achieves longevity escape velocity–the minimum rate at which those therapies need to be improved in order to allow people not to suffer from age-related ill-health at any age.[39] He thinks that there is a 50% chance that this breakthrough is only 15 years away (as of 2022).[40]

However, de Grey views the fatalistic attitude toward aging in society, as he sees it, as a hurdle in the rapid development of anti-aging medicine, which he calls "pro-aging trance".

Future of work

According to de Grey, automation will take over most jobs in the future.[41] He also believes that the introduction of a universal basic income is necessary to find "some new way to distribute wealth that doesn’t depend on being paid to do things we wouldn’t otherwise do".[41]

Cryonics

De Grey is a cryonicist, having signed up with Alcor.[42]

Criticism

Technology Review debate

In 2005, MIT Technology Review, in cooperation with the Methuselah Foundation, announced a $20,000 prize for any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that SENS was "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate." The judges of the challenge were Rodney Brooks, Anita Goel, Vikram Sheel Kumar, Nathan Myhrvold, and Craig Venter. Five submissions were made, of which three met the terms of the challenge. De Grey wrote a rebuttal to each submission, and the challengers wrote responses to each rebuttal. The judges concluded that none of the challengers had disproved SENS, but the magazine opined that one of the submissions had been particularly eloquent and well written, and awarded the contestant $10,000. The judges also noted "the proponents of SENS have not made a compelling case for SENS", and wrote that many of its proposals could not be verified with the current level of scientific knowledge and technology, concluding that "SENS does not compel the assent of many knowledgeable scientists; but neither is it demonstrably wrong."[43] The critics single out three proposed therapies for criticism: somatic telomerase deletion, somatic mitochondrial genome engineering, and the use of transgenic microbial hydrolase.[44]

Later in 2005, he was the subject of an associated critical editorial article in the MIT Technology Review, which viewed his theories as oversimplifying anti-aging as a scientific goal, and expressed concern at a lack of ethical and moral considerations towards anti-aging research.[45]

EMBO Reports

A 2005 article about SENS published in the viewpoint section of EMBO Reports by 28 scientists concluded that none of de Grey's hypotheses "has ever been shown to extend the lifespan of any organism, let alone humans".[46] The SENS Research Foundation, of which de Grey was a co-founder, acknowledged this, stating, "If you want to reverse the damage of aging right now I'm afraid the simple answer is, you can't."[47] Moreover, de Grey argued that this reveals a serious gap in understanding between basic scientists and technologists and between biologists studying aging and those studying regenerative medicine.[48]

The 31-member Research Advisory Board of de Grey's SENS Research Foundation have signed an endorsement of the plausibility of the SENS approach.[49] In 2021, the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), showcased a SENS research project and provided a grant for the research.[50][51]

Sexual harassment allegations

In August 2021, following allegations of sexual harassment by two women, de Grey was put on administrative leave by SENS.[52]

Both women describe situations in which de Grey, {...} explicitly spoke with them about sex. According to Halioua’s account, he even told her that it was her responsibility to sleep with SENS donors to encourage financial contributions. Deming was only 17 when, she alleges, de Grey told her he wanted to speak with her about his “adventurous love life.” Deming says that when she recently became aware that this was not a one-off incident, she was “angry to realize that Aubrey inappropriately propositioned more than one woman over whom he was in a position of power, many in the community knew about it, and no one did anything,” she writes.[53]

Days later, the SENS board of directors decided to remove de Grey from his position as chief science officer, severing all ties with him following the report that he had allegedly attempted to interfere with the sexual harassment investigation.[54]

The independent investigator determined that de Grey made sexually inappropriate remarks to both Deming and Halioua. The investigator also decided de Grey's attempt to communicate with Halioua via a third party constituted interference, although de Grey stated he believed that phase of the investigation had concluded. The investigator found that various other allegations against de Grey were not substantiated.[55][56]

In March 2022, the SENS Research Foundation released a statement regarding de Grey's employment affirming that while his actions "did substantiate instances of poor judgment and boundary-crossing behaviors, Dr. de Grey is not a sexual predator."[57]

Bibliography
  • de Grey, Aubrey (1999). The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging. Austin: R.G. Landes Company. ISBN 1-57059-564-X.
  • de Grey, Aubrey, ed. (2004). Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence: Why Genuine Control of Aging May Be Foreseeable. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. ISBN 978-1573314961.
  • de Grey, Aubrey; Rae, Michael (2007). Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs that Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-312-36706-0. OCLC 132583222.
  • Polymath, D. H. J. (April 2018). "Hadwiger-Nelson problem (Polymath project page)".

See also

References
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  57. Announcement from the SRF Board of Directors
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