Update: Because I'm interested in having others help me gather information about Aubrey and SENS, I'm in the process of moving the little information on this page to a GitHub repository.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
Sens
http://www.sens.org/
2005.07 - TED - A roadmap to end aging - 23 mins
2006 - Defeat of aging - utopia or foreseeable scientific reality?
- This is a good summary of his argument.
- "I estimate a 50% chance that they will arrive within 25 years given adequate funding. I also explain why, even though these therapies will initially confer only perhaps 30 additional years of healthy life, those who benefit from them will very probably also benefit from progressively improved therapies, thereby maintaining “life extension escape velocity” and avoiding death from age-related causes at any age, with the result that (barring global catastrophe) many of them will attain four-digit lifespans."
- "Aging is the set of side-effects of metabolism that alter the composition of the body over time to make it progressively less capable of self-maintenance and thereby, eventually, progressively less functional."
"As noted, we must also specify a degree of progress that can be considered an appropriate milestone. The one that I have championed in recent years, with the moniker “Robust Mouse Rejuvenation” (RMR), is to treble the remaining average lifespan of a cohort of naturally long-lived mice that are already 2/3 through their natural lifespan before any intervention (whether genetic, pharmacological or dietary) is begun. Long-lived mouse strains typically live to three years of age on average, so this means initiative a protocol on such mice at the age of two years and giving them an average age at death of five years."
"I recently proposed an anti-cancer strategy termed WILT (Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres) that is as ambitious as it is audacious: the use of both ex vivo and somatic gene therapy to delete the genes for telomerase and (as and when they are identified) ALT (Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres) from as many of our cells as possible. This will have deleterious side effects that are obvious and daunting: telomere shortening will irresistibly eliminate the stem cell
pools that maintain all our continually-renewing tissues, such as the blood, the gut and the skin. My proposal is to avert these consequences by periodic replenishment of our stem cell pools with new cells that also lack genes for telomere elongation but have had their telomeres extended ex vivo to normal lengths with exogenous telomerase.""Once RMR is achieved, I am convinced that society’s attitude to the postponement of human aging will become unrecognisable. I have therefore predicted that there is a 50% chance of our achieving a comparable advance in human life extension within 15 years after we achieve RMR. This human milestone, which I rather unimaginatively term “Robust Human Rejuvenation” or RHR, is not in my formulation precisely proportional to RMR: rather than a trebling of the remaining lifespan of people who are already 2/3 of the way to the prevailing average age at death, I define it as only a doubling. This means roughly 25-30 years of extra healthy life for people who are 55 when treatment begins.
Why have I chosen a relatively toned-down version of RMR to define as RHR? Simply, because 25- 30 years is a familiar duration in the history of technology, and specifically in that part of the history of many technologies which, in respect of life extension, I will now discuss. How long does it take, following some fundamental technological breakthrough, for that technology to progress by incremental refinements to a stage beyond that which the architects of the original breakthrough could reasonably have contemplated? The answer seems rather reliably to be in the 20-30 year range. Lindbergh flew the Atlantic 24 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight. Commercial jetliners first flew 22 years after that, and supersonic airliners 20 years after that. In computing, the personal computer arrived about 28 years after the first electronic computer and the first convenient laptops arrived about 20 years later. In medicine, the discovery of antibiotics followed the publicising of the germ theory by about 30 years and was in turn followed, after another 25 years, by the development of methods to manufacture vaccines specific for a particular disease. [NW: This part doesn't sound very persuasive to me...]
The implications of this pattern for the lives of people who are in middle age or younger at the time that RHR is achieved is clear, but no less dramatic for that. Put simply, there is a very high probability that the 25-30 years of good health conferred on its recipients by the first-generation panel of rejuvenation therapies (defined as those which achieve RHR) will suffice for the development of much more thorough and comprehensive therapies, capable of delivering more like a century of extra life to those who are in relatively good health at the time those therapies arrive. This is where the longevity escape velocity (LEV) concept arises. The recipients of the first-generation therapies – the ones that gave only around 30 years of extra healthy life – will, at least if sociopolitical pressures do not intervene, mostly also be among the beneficiaries of the secondgeneration ones, since they will be in the same degree of health at that time as they were when the first-generation therapies arrived. The same logic of course applies indefinitely into the future, just so long as the rate of progress in improving the comprehensiveness of the therapies continues to outstrip the rate at which the remaining imperfections in those therapies allow the accumulation of eventually pathogenic damage."
- 2006 - Technology Review - Is Defeating Aging Only a Dream?
- 2007 - Prospects for extending healthy life - a lot
- 2010.10.19 - WIRED - How Beer, Oprah and Sergey Brin Can Help Cure Aging
- This seemed to be a better-than-average interview. Expand the thing below for my highlights.
- 2011.01.27 - New Cancer Mentality - Aubrey de Grey, Part 2
0:40 - Cancer is the hardest part of aging to fix, and it may be worth pursuing strategies that exacerbate other aspects of aging because we can treat those other issues more easily than we can deal with cancer.
1:22 - The big mistake we may have been making is to try to distinguish between cancer cells and noncancerous cells.
2:30 - So what we want is to find something that's harmless to both cells and noncancerous cells for several years. The obvious candidate was telomere shortening.
3:19 - Once we've developed gene therapy, we could use gene targeting to delete the genes for telomerase for both cancer cells and noncancer cells.
4:10 - This would have enormous side-effects. Various body systems would fail very quickly. They'd probably only last 10 years. But that might be OK. We could keep those systems going with periodic stem cell replenishment.
5:35 - It's an extremely challenging proposal. It's the hardest component of his proposal to defeat aging. He's hopeful it won't be necessary.
6:20 - People were hopeful 40 years ago about defeating cancer, and they were wrong. We should not limit ourselves today to just those approaches which seem most promising, because they may turn out to not work; we should also also be pursuing much-more ambitious / aggressive approaches.
6:55 - Explanation of what telomeres are.
Part 2:
0:00 Are there any other roles for telomerase? [I guess that would make it not plausible to just get rid of telomerase.]
A: There are some studies. In humans, cells either have no telomerase or as little as possible. So that suggests any role that telomerase plays in other organisms2:00 - Can we already knock out telomerase?
A: We can do it in cells in culture, but we haven't gotten to the point where we can do it in humans. It's going to take a lot of work to get it working.3:15 - How can we get more collaboration?
A: More money. The problem is scientists perceive that the best way to get funded is to stick to what their speciality is. That leads to excessive specialization. People like me, who are just keeping an eye on the big picture, are much more necessary. One of the reasons that I moved into this field was that I observed that there were no theoretical biologists in the way that there are theoretical physicists.5:20 - Q: Are pharma companies on the wrong path?
A: They're looking for opportunities that can be commercialized immediately. We need funding for research that can't be immediately commercialized.6:10 - Q: What would you say to people who need treatment now [for cancer]?
A: (He seemed to dodge the question, since the answer is most likely, "These treatments won't arrive in time for them.")7:18 - Immunotherapy for cancer is a promising area that is not being pursued as aggressively as it could be.
7:40 - Q: What would you tell people who are doing experiments looking at the whole genome?
A: I think some of the research is useful, and some of it is not useful.
- 2011.09.26 - TEDxOxford - 20 mins
- 2012.04 - TEDxUChicago - 20 mins
- 2013.02 Galactic Public Archives - Introduction to Dr. Aubrey de Grey
- 2013.07 - Life Extension Magazine - Interview with Aubrey de Grey
LE: You recently inherited a large sum of money and chose to donate most of it to the SENS Foundation. Will you provide some details and explain your motives?
AdG: My mother died in May 2011 and I was her only child; the upshot is that I inherited roughly $16.5 million. Of that, I assigned $13 million to SENS (I won’t bore you with the legal details, which were tedious in the extreme). It was pretty much a no-brainer for me: I’ve dedicated my life to this mission, and I dedicate all my time to it, so why not my money too? I retained enough to buy a nice house, but beyond that I have inexpensive tastes and I have no doubt that this is the best use of my wealth.
LE: Who are the other major donors to the SENS Foundation, and what proportion of the budget is covered by the money you donated?
AdG: My donation will be spent over a period of about five years, and it roughly doubles the budget we had previously, from $2 million annually to $4 million. The number one external donor remains our stalwart supporter Peter Thiel. Additionally, another internet entrepreneur, Jason Hope, has recently begun to contribute comparable sums.
(...)
LE: What is advantageous and what is disadvantageous about the money spent on aging research by the National Institute on Aging (NIA, a branch of the US federal government’s National Institutes of Health)?
AdG: It’s pretty much all advantageous - just not nearly as advantageous as it could be. There is pitifully little money going into the search for interventions to postpone aging, and of what there is, pitifully little is focused on late-onset interventions.
(...)
LE: For which of your SENS strategies would success achieve the most additional healthy years?
AdG: No one strategy would achieve very much on its own - certainly not as much as ten years, probably not even five.
LE: Which of the SENS strategies has the best prospect for success first?
AdG: A couple of the strategies are already in clinical trials for some relevant conditions - stem cells for various things, including Parkinson’s disease, and vaccination against extracellular debris for Alzheimer’s.
LE: Which of the SENS strategies would be the most difficult to achieve?
AdG: I think it’s pretty clear that the approaches for defeating cancer and for obviating mitochondrial mutations are the hardest, because they will both involve gene therapy, something we’re not at all good at yet. Out of those two, I would say that the OncoSENS (the elimination of telomerase enzyme) is the harder, because it is much more complex and also because it involves gene targeting rather than just insertional gene therapy.
- 2013.09.17 - SRF CSO Dr. Aubrey de Grey discusses SENS6
- 2013.09.18 - TIME - Opinion by Aubrey de Grey - Google’s Calico: the War on Aging Has Truly Begun
- In his 2014.07.28 talk at Google he says he was approached by Time to write this in reaction to the announcement of Calico (it was announced via Time magazine).
- Now is the right time for a commercial entity to get heavily involved. (...) With Google’s decision to direct its astronomical resources to a concerted assault on aging, that battle may have been transcended: once financial limitations are removed, curmudgeons no longer matter. That’s why I think it is no exaggeration to state that the end of the beginning may have arrived. I won’t go so far as to say that my crusading job is done, but for sure it just got a whole lot easier.
- 2013.09.28 - Aubrey de Grey - Google vs Death: an Anti Aging Initiative
- He discusses the recent announcement of Calico
- 2013.11.10 - TEDxSalford - 20 mins
- 2013.11.02 - Rejuvenation biotechnology: Aubrey De Grey at TEDxVienna
- 2013.12 - Aubrey de Grey speaker preview of Anticipating 2025
- He thinks a realistic goal for 2025 is to be able to take middle-aged mice and extend their remaining lifespan by 2 or 3 times. For example, you take mice that normally live 3 years, do nothing until they're 2 years old, and then apply therapies that will make the mice live until they're 4 or 5.
- 2014 - Seeking immortality: Aubrey de Grey at TEDxSalford - 20 mins
- 2014.04.07 - "Ending Aging" | Talks at Google
- 7:30 - He explains the misconception of thinking of aging itself as being separate from the diseases of old age (like alzheimer's).
- 8:30 - He explains that you can't "cure" the diseases of old age in the same way you can cure tuberculosis, because the diseases of old age are side-effects of being alive, and so as long as you're alive you will have damage accumulating.
- 9:30 - He shows a graph that shows the mistaken division between what people think of old age (frailty) and the diseases of old age.
- 11-11:30 - He says that the geriatric approach is to fight the symptoms and hope that the disease will be cured. But he says it's obvious that won't work because the damage will continue to accrue.
- 12:30 - He explains another approach, which tries to clean up how the body works so that damage won't accumulate. He explains that the problem with this approach is that the body is incredibly complicated.
- 14:55 - He introduces his car maintenance example. He shows a car that is 100 years old and still looks new.
- 16:00 - He then explains his approach: go in and repair damage. Don't try to stop damage from happening. Don't just try to treat the symptoms of damage.
- 17:10 - He explains the seven sub-problems which need to be solved to make his approach work.
- 18:25 - 1. Cell loss: cells die and aren't replaced
- 18:44 - 2. Too many cells (eg cancer)
- 19:30 - 3. Mitochondrial mutations
- 20:10 - 4. Intracellular junk / garbage not being removed from cells
- 20:50 - 5. Extracellular junk
- 21:10 - 6. Extracellular matrix stiffening
- 22:00 - Someone asks him whether we'll ever need to fix cellular mutations. de Grey says it's so rare that we won't need to worry about it in our current lifespans, except for cancer, which he has in another spot.
- 23:00 - He makes the point that if we can implement the maintenance approach properly, we won't need to know all about how the body works.
- 24:55 - He addresses the question of whether his list of seven problems is exhaustive. He says that it has been the same list since 1982. He has been challenging people since 2002 to add to the list and hasn't had anyone bring up any new items.
- ~27-30 - He goes through how heart disease, alzheimer's, and frailty correspond to the seven categories
- 30:40 - He explains the four methods of solving these seven categories of problems: replace, reinforce
- 32-34 - He talks about parkinson's as an example of using the four Rs. He mentions that the short-term incentives of researchers made them give up for a long time on trying to do research in this.
- 33:40 - He thinks we are in such a good position that we might have a true cure for parkinson's within 10 years
- 36:50 - He makes the point that longevity is a side-effect of health. He isn't focused on longevity.
- 37 -
- 38:20 - He explains that there is increasing interest from the private sector. He describes Calico.
- 39:30 - He describes "Human Longevity Inc."
- 40:00 - He says that the problem is not yet being worked on in a comprehensive manner. He says SENS is good to keep an eye on what things are being neglected.
- 41-43 - He gives an example of the kind of research that SENS itself does.
- 47 - He explains the idea of how imperfect technology which buys us 30 years of extra life could give us enough time to refine the treatments enough to make them much more effective.
- 49 - He introduces the term "longevity escape velocity"
- 50:20 - He introduces the idea that within 10 years people are going to realize that there is a real chance of this working.
- 53:53 - He ends his talk and switches to questions
- 54 - Q: If we just fixed one thing and didn't fix the other things, would there be secondary benefits for the other problems?
- A: Yes, but the question is how
- 56:10 - Q:
- 56:30 - Q: What do you think it will cost to do the necessary research?
- A: The money will get much bigger at later stages, but he doesn't worry about it b/c once they get dramatic results in mice the money will surge in from governments etc. He says $100 million per year for 10 years.
- 57:40 - Q: Are there parts of the body that aren't designed to be rejuvenated? For example, teeth.
- A: He says yes, but those
- 58:20 - Q: We haven't done very well with maximum lifespan, which makes it seem like there are other mechanisms other than damage.
- A: ...
- He says it's strange that no one has beaten the world-record for age of 122 years.
- 1:00:50 - Q: Do you think about nanobots?
- A: He thinks they have a very good prospect of playing an increasing role as time goes on.
- 1:01:40 - Q: Is aging programmed?
- A: The consensus is "No", but a long time ago it was thought the answer was "Yes".
- 1:03:40 - Q: What about calorie restriction?
- A: We have less impressive machinery than mice and nematodes to respond to calorie restriction by slowing metabolic processes.
- 2014.05.08 - St. Gallen Symposium
- 2014.07.28 - Talks at Google - Aubrey de Grey: "The Science of Ending Aging"
- This was a good talk.
"My estimate is this: I think we have at least a 50-50 chance of getting the technologies that I described today working reasonably well within the next 20 to 25 years. And the technologies that I described today, I think will probably give about 30 additional years of healthy life, and of course they will give those years to people who are already in middle age or older, 60, 70, or even maybe 80, at the time that the therapies arrive. So that means most people in this room have a relatively good chance of benefiting. Two caveats: First caveat: Everything I just said is only going to be true if research in the next 5 or 10 years goes a lot faster than its currently going. The funding limitation that exists at the moment, I estimate, is slowing things down by roughly a factor of 3. In other words, over the past 10 years, the amount of progress we've made towards getting proof-of-concept of these things in the lab and so on has probably only advanced by about 3 years relative to how well it could have gone if only science had been limiting. The second caveat is the probabilities: so, I can tell you a 50-50 estimate, but I will tell you right now the variance is high. I think that there's at least a 10% chance that we won't get there for a hundred years. But who cares? A 50% chance is perfectly enough to be worth fighting for.
Question: About a year ago there was set up this company called "Calico", the California life company, we set it up to work independently. And I was just wondering: First of all, how do you view this development? And secondly, have you had the chance to work with them so far?
Answer: Yeah, actually I was very surprised that no one at the talk I gave at lunchtime asked about Calico. But yes, Calico was set up by Larry and Sergey about a year ago...and, well, my view of that development was expressed in Time magazine, which was where the thing was announced. Time got me to write the reaction piece, so to speak, and I was...pretty effusive. I was overjoyed. And I still am. I think that there is a very respectable chance that they will make a really big difference. But only a chance. It just remains to be seen. They are taking their own really good time to decide exactly where they're going to be prioritizing their efforts. And in a way that's a good thing. The worst thing that could possibly happen would have been a repeat of what happened 15 years ago when another very wealthy individual, Larry Ellison, decides to do essentially the same thing, albeit in a foundation rather than a company. He basically went out and promptly hired a veteran gerontologist from the NIA, and the result was completely predictable: 15 years and $400 million later, absolutely nothing had been done that wouldn't have been done anyway. And he's given up now. So Calico is potentially a really good thing: they've got people at the top who are by-and-large not trained gerontologists, and therefore they know what they don't know; they're making their own decisions. They're not talking to us nearly as much as we'd like them to, and as we think they should be, but...that may change. So I'm hopeful.
- 2015.04.11 - DailyMail - He's an old Harrovian multi-millionaire with a wife and two girlfriends
PayPal boss Peter Thiel (worth £1.5 billion) donated £2.4 million to de Grey's anti-ageing institute Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS). Senescence is scientific jargon for ageing.
(...)
De Grey is notoriously eccentric. He refuses to carry a mobile phone ('anti-social, nasty things') and has never learned to drive due to a 'mental block'. 'Cars can kill people without it being the driver's fault,' he says. He gives interviews to 'spread the word' and has written several anti-ageing books.
Last year he featured in a critically acclaimed independent movie, The Immortalists.
De Grey and his biologist wife Adelaide, 19 years his senior, have an unconventional marriage and he cheerfully admits to having 'two younger girlfriends', aged 45 and 24.
Isn't juggling the needs of three women enough to age any man prematurely? He laughs: 'It keeps me busy.'
- 2017.06.01 - YouTube - Dr. Aubrey de Grey Interview : Controlling the Main Aging Damages - Where Are We Now?
- 0:18 - Q: There are several main damages to find by SENS system; what about the progress in each direction? If you don't mind, let's begin with the least-developed areas.
A: So, it's really good news right now, actually. The situation maybe two years ago was that there were two areas that had made hardly any progress for the previous decade. One of them was MITOSENS, dealing with mitochondrial mutations, and the other was GLYCOSENS, the crosslink problem, where the extracellular matrix becomes less elastic. In both those cases, over the past two years, we have seen really good progress, it's got everything moving again. (...) On the mitochondrial side...I think at this point, everybody is taking us seriously, everybody is taking the idea seriously, it's a very different world than it was even two years ago. - 3:18 - Q: What about the most-developed areas; what we could expect–when we could expect an intervention for humans appear? Probably it will be some next decades for some damages...?
A: Well, actually, things are going really fast in a lot of areas now.
- 0:18 - Q: There are several main damages to find by SENS system; what about the progress in each direction? If you don't mind, let's begin with the least-developed areas.
An argument that Mark Zuckerberg may be aware of and funding the research de Grey has been seeking funding for
- Peter Thiel has a significant connection with Aubrey de Grey.
- Peter is the most-prominent supporter of Aubrey de Grey and is probably the first-or-second-most-famous proponent of life extension in Silicon Valley along with Ray Kurzweil.
- Peter Thiel has a significant connection with Mark Zuckerberg.
- Peter was the first outside investor in Facebook and sits on the Facebook Board of Directors.
- The language used by Mark in his statement is similar to that used by Peter and Aubrey.
- Peter Thiel has said that the push to cure aging will tend to be framed as a push to cure certain diseases, and the net effect of that is that it will lead to longer lives. (Source)
- "Well, I don't think there's anything incompatible with indefinite life extension and Christianity. I think that in practice the question will never get framed that way. It will always be framed: "Do you want to cure cancer? Do you want to cure this type of disease or that sort of disease?" So it's not like you're gonna take this pill and you will live forever."
- Aubrey has spoken about how current research is not aggressive enough.
- "We should not limit ourselves today to just those approaches which seem most promising, because they may turn out to not work; we should also also be pursuing much-more ambitious / aggressive approaches." (Source)
Wired.com: On the other hand, cancer is probably going to be the toughest.
de Grey: I feel that’s true, yes.
Wired.com: Yet, it’s already an area with significant funding and research.
de Grey: Well, you’ve got to look at it closely; 99.9 percent is going into ways in which we might delay cancer by 10 years. Which is a fine goal if you don’t expect to delay anything else by 10 years, right? But hello [laughs], it’s no good for me. So, to be perfectly honest, it’s a pretty stupid way of estimating the promise of a therapy in the first place.
Even if things don’t move forward, incrementally they still move forward. And that’s why cancer has now caught up with cardiovascular disease in the U.S. as a cause of death. We need to put a little bit more money into the much more aggressive, longer-term, more ambitious but nevertheless eventually much more effective approaches that need to be explored. In particular, [OncoSENS] is in my view still the only game in town for a real solution to cancer.
- Peter Thiel has said that the push to cure aging will tend to be framed as a push to cure certain diseases, and the net effect of that is that it will lead to longer lives. (Source)
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin are aware of Aubrey de Grey, visited his labs, and started their own attempt (Calico).
- Zuck presumably pays close attention to what Google does, so he's presumably also aware of Aubrey de Grey.
- Zuck's money is apparently going primarily into diseases that afflict westerners rather than those that afflict the poor.
- "The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will apparently direct three-quarters of its efforts towards heart disease, cancer and neurological disease, the chronic conditions of the west." (Source)
Q: What are the main differences between rich and poor countries with respect to causes of death?
In high-income countries, 7 in every 10 deaths are among people aged 70 years and older. People predominantly die of chronic diseases: cardiovascular diseases, cancers, dementia, chronic obstructive lung disease or diabetes. Lower respiratory infections remain the only leading infectious cause of death. Only 1 in every 100 deaths is among children under 15 years.
In low-income countries, nearly 4 in every 10 deaths are among children under 15 years, and only 2 in every 10 deaths are among people aged 70 years and older. People predominantly die of infectious diseases: lower respiratory infections, HIV/AIDS, diarrhoeal diseases, malaria and tuberculosis collectively account for almost one third of all deaths in these countries. Complications of childbirth due to prematurity, and birth asphyxia and birth trauma are among the leading causes of death, claiming the lives of many newborns and infants. (Source)
- What isn't said in his statement is this: Aging is really just a collection of diseases. So once you "cure all diseases", you've cured the aging process.
- He also frames it in terms of helping his children instead of himself. Which is smart, given the push-back de Grey has gotten to his ideas.
- Interestingly, I can't find any statement by de Grey regarding this announcement.
So...I guess the thing to watch is what research gets funded by the initiative.