What You Can Do To Remain Youthful and Live Longer

Scott: What advice would you give if someone wants to stay youthful longer? What's one thing they could do to live longer and healthier?

Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D.: Ultimately at this point, the medicines and lifestyle optimizations and so on that exist today are pretty much ineffective for people who are already doing okay, only averagely unhealthy for their age or even healthy for their age. At the moment we really can't do much. So, the short answer for your question is that the only way that someone can really make a difference to their chances of postponing ill health by a lot in the future is by working to hasten the development of these therapies that don't yet exist. So of course people can support this research financially, but they can also do all manner of different types of advocacy. People like you can interview me and get the word out that way, you can have lectures at conferences, all manner of things like that. Getting the word out, educating people that this is not science fiction, it's science foreseeable. It's medicine foreseeable. It's going to happen, and the sooner it happens, the better. Getting that word out is really what it's all about right now.

Scott: Talk about your foundation a little bit, the SENS. Many people think you're just working on longevity but that's not exactly the case, correct?

Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D.: SENS Research Foundation is a 501c(3) public charity, which of course that means that any US citizen who donates to us can get tax relief. That actually also applies to outside the US; we have affiliate organizations in Europe and in Canada. We're a biomedical research charity. We are pretty small, still. We only spent maybe $4 million last year, but that allows us to have lab space in Mountain View, California; about 3000 square feet, where three of our major projects happen, and also to fund upwards of a dozen research projects at top universities around the world. We have projects at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Rice, University of Cambridge in England, all over the place. So it's definitely a vibrant operation.

And what we do is we develop ways to repair the various types of molecular and cellular damage that accumulate throughout life and eventually kill us. Sometime around 2000, I realized, and started to tell people, that the damage that accumulates throughout life and contributes to age-related disease, actually isn't very complicated, and it can be classified into just seven major categories. Within each of those categories is a particular generic type of therapy which, with of course certain changes of detail depending on the example will be able to repair, and thereby preempt the consequences of, that type of damage. So that's what we work on.

And it's going okay. We're definitely pressing forward, making good progress. I wrote a book a few years ago, Ending Aging, which discusses this in a great deal of detail; and that's of course very heartening itself, that we can actually describe this in a lot of detail, because it's reason for optimism that the plan will actually work. That plan is really standing the test of time. We sort of don't need to write another book, now, because progress has certainly been made, but it's been very much the progress we predicted. So it's all pretty good news. Yeah, that's what SENS Research Foundation does; and the bigger we grow, the faster we're going to be able to do it.