How long is it possible to stay young and healthy ?
Dr Aubrey de Grey maintains that the first person to live for hundreds of years has already been born.
A Cambridge-educated biomedical theorist, Dr de Grey, who has dedicated his life to finding ways to extend the human lifespan, is certainly no stranger to the science behind the ageing process.
A firm believer in the idea that humans will eventually be able to live indefinitely, de Grey now claims that the first person to live for 1,000 years has probably already been born.
“You know, people have this crazy concept that ageing is natural and inevitable, and I have to keep explaining that it is not,” he said. “The human body is a machine with moving parts and like a car or an aeroplane, it accumulates damage throughout life as a consequence of normal operation.”
His research team is currently working on new types of regenerative therapies that have already received substantial financial support from key figures at companies such as Google and PayPal.
“By reconstructing the structured order of the living machinery of our tissues, these rejuvenation biotechnologies will restore the normal functioning of the body’s cells and essential biomolecules, returning ageing tissues to health and bringing back the body’s youthful vigor,” the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) Research Foundation claims.
Not everyone is convinced however that de Grey’s predictions of 1,000-year lifespans are correct.
“No one in the future could be genetically modified for a human to live longer than say 120 years,” said Dr Tilo Kunath of the Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
“You couldn’t even do it through diet or medicine, no not within the next 100 years.”
