Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK, and has most recently served as Chairman and Chief Science Officer of the Methuselah Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world's only peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging.

   His research interests focus on the accumulating, and eventually pathogenic, molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism ("damage"). This "damage" constitutes mammalian aging and Aubrey's work seeks to design the interventions necessary for its repair and/or obviation. He has developed a potentially comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks the aging problem down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. A key aspect of SENS is its potential to extend healthy lifespan without limit, even with repair processes which remain imperfect, as the repair only needs to approach perfection rapidly enough to keep the overall level of damage below pathogenic levels. Aubrey has termed this required rate of improvement of repair therapies, "longevity escape velocity". In 2007 Aubrey published his book, Ending Aging, bringing his ideas to a wider audience.

   A true maverick, Aubrey de Grey challenges the most basic assumption underlying the human condition -- that aging is inevitable. He argues instead that aging is a disease -- one that can be cured if it's approached as "an engineering problem." His plan calls for identifying all the components that cause human tissue to age, and designing remedies for each of them — forestalling disease and eventually pushing back death. He calls the approach Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS).

   With his astonishingly long beard, wiry frame and penchant for bold and cutting proclamations, de Grey is a magnet for controversy. A computer scientist, self-taught biogerontologist and researcher, he has co-authored journal articles with some of the most respected scientists in the field.

   But the scientific community doesn't know what to make of him. In July 2005, the MIT Technology Review challenged scientists to disprove de Grey's claims, offering a $20,000 prize (half the prize money was put up by de Grey's Methuselah Foundation) to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that "SENS is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate." The challenge remains open; the judging panel includes TEDsters Craig Venter and Nathan Myhrvold. It seems that "SENS exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt," MIT's judges wrote. 

Speeches:

1) Biology of Combating Aging - Cutting Edge Developments (To address potential therapies and approaches at the time of the speech)

2) The Debate Over Extended Longevity - Social, Economic, Theological, Psychological Implications

   The rise of life expectancy, and the related rise in average age of the population, is currently considered a problem - a severe one - for the economies of the developed world and increasingly elsewhere too. From a purely biological perspective this is a paradox, because this rise has been achieved by increasing the duration of healthy (so, potentially, economically productive) life, not that of economically expensive frailty at the end of life. 

   Arguably, the main reason for this paradox is that the increase of lifespan has been slow, making it political difficult to respond by unpopular measures such as raising the age of eligibility for the state pension.  If the fundamental 
basis of aging is successfully combated, life expectancy will increase 
far faster than hitherto - so fast, in fact, that period life expectancy will cease to be a meaningful concept.  In this scenario, dramatic policy changes may be politically more acceptable than now. Moreover, a sustained, rapid rate of progress in postponing aging would have a sharper effect on the proportion of the population that are frail than on the proportion of a given person's life that is spent in frailty, yet further altering the economic arithmetic.

3) Regenerative therapies against aging: can they be comprehensive enough?

   The relevance of nearly all biogerontology research to combating aging is restricted to the potential for slowing down the accumulation of molecular and cellular damage that eventually leads to age-related ill-health. Meanwhile, regenerative medicine has been progressing rapidly and is nearing clinical applicability to a wide range of specific conditions.

   Dr de Grey will argue that we are approaching the point where regenerative medicine can be used against aging. This would entail not retarding but actually reversing the accumulation of damage. If successful, this would obviously be a far more valuable technology than mere slowing of aging. However, in order to be successful it must be comprehensive, and some aspects of aging may seem impossible to address in this way. Dr de Grey will survey the main examples and argue that the ones which contribute to age-related ill-health are, in fact, realistic targets of regenerative interventions.