San Francisco Gate Monday, September 18, 2006
Entrepreneur backs research on anti-aging
Scientist says humans could live indefinitely
- Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
A controversial scientist who hopes to help humans live for thousands of years has received a multimillion-dollar grant from a Bay Area entrepreneur.
Peter A. Thiel, co-founder and former chief executive officer of the online payments system PayPal, announced Saturday he is pledging $3.5 million “to support scientific research into the alleviation and eventual reversal of the debilities caused by aging.”
The recipient will be the Methuselah Foundation, a Springfield, Va., nonprofit started and run by the most colorful scientist in aging
research: Aubrey de Grey, a 43-year-old English researcher who says he hopes to “radically postpone aging, giving indefinite life spans.”
In short, de Grey’s thesis is that there are seven main causes of aging, and that if those can be licked, then people could live indefinitely.
Among aging experts, de Grey’s reputation is so widely contested that a headline over an article last year in an MIT-based publication, Technology Review, asked: “He’s brilliant, but is he nuts?” In a tongue-in-cheek letter to the magazine in response to the story, top aging authority Richard Miller, of the University of Michigan, wrote that he’d like de Grey to help him solve a similarly complex technological problem: how to make pigs fly.
De Grey told The Chronicle in e-mails and phone conversations last week that he isn’t disturbed by scientific critics. Some of them, he noted, argue that death is inevitable because the cells and genes of living organisms inevitably accumulate errors that eventually kill them.
But, he pointed out, because of careful upkeep “we have vintage cars driving around that were designed to last 15 years—and they’re 100 years old.”
So why should humans be any different?
De Grey, who received a doctorate in biology at Cambridge University in 2000 and worked in the university’s genetics department from 1992 until a few months ago, characterized the $3.5 million grant as a “major breakthrough” in his effort to get research on indefinite extension of lifespan “really moving in the laboratory.”
“It’s “pump-priming,” he said. “I need probably $1 billion over 10 years” to achieve that goal.”
IEET Blog