Wired interview with life extensionist Aubrey de Grey

Wired has posted an excellent interview with biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. The discussion covers a lot of ground, including recent advancements in the field, the NewOrgan Prize, funding issues, the media and insights into Aubrey's personal life. Here are some highlights:

Wired.com: So you’ve obviously put a lot of effort into messaging. Yet, you say your ideas are often misconstrued and misrepresented.

de Grey: I’ve found it frustrating the media, especially, are pretty much fixated on the longevity aspects and not on the health aspects. It wouldn’t annoy me so much if it was not so overdone. But even the most highbrow write-ups, like one in The Economist a couple of years ago for example, every single one has the word “immortality” or “living forever” in the title of the article. It does wind me up a little bit.

Wired.com: Why do you suppose they do that?

de Grey: Sells papers. You don’t have to ask me, you’re the journalist.

Wired.com: Press also helps get funding, no?

de Grey: No, rather the opposite. It makes it sound like entertainment. It sounds like science fiction and not real science. It really actively detracts from my ability to get funding.

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Wired.com: You’ve said that when these treatments become a reality, they should be free and available to all.

de Grey: It’s not a matter of should. I’m not making a political opinion here. I’m saying it’s inevitable they will be.

Wired.com: Right. Governments would minimize the costs of taking care of the elderly by investing money up front.

de Grey: Right. The developing world is more fragile, but certainly within the industrialized world — and that of course will include China and India at that point — I think we can be absolutely certain the ability to pay will not be an issue.

Wired.com: Do you think people who engage in risk-heavy behavior — say, smoking — should be given rejuvenation treatments regardless?

de Grey: Absolutely. But the reason I can say that so confidently is simply because risks like smoking or overeating will simply not be so risky anymore. It’s possible those therapies will need to be applied somewhat more frequently to such people than to other people. But still we’re talking there about something that’s happening to everybody. So it’s something that won’t be the subject of insurance, it will be something preventative that will be provided routinely.

Wired.com: It’s difficult to imagine a time where people who have more money won’t have access first.

de Grey: Oh yeah. The question is what will the interval be. Remember, these are going to be experimental treatments. If I was Bill Gates I wouldn’t want to be first, right? There are going to be risks. Things are going to go wrong early on. And as far as I’m concerned, the more goes wrong the better, in the sense I sure as fuck don’t want all of these treatments to be made restricted to only people in clinical trials until Phase III is over.

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You’ve had what you consider huge breakthroughs in hotels in California, a pub in Italy, a hotel in Dresden. How does being away from home and hanging out in pubs inform your thinking?

de Grey: It is important both in terms of how I think and also especially in terms of how I actually do my work; how I actually get the idea out and so on. I’ve given a talk on How To Be a Successful Heretic. It’s a 10-point plan. And one of them is “Be everywhere (a pint is worth 1,000 words).” You know, beer just works for me. I’m just lucky that way.

Wired.com: What do you mean?

de Grey: It just helps me to think. I just communicate well in the context of alcohol, somehow as well as thinking. Also, it’s a bit of a role model thing. As I mentioned, the Methuselah Foundation had a bit of a problem with looking a bit too much like a fan club. But one could go too far the other way. I think having a bit of a personality cult around what I do works well. I have to obviously give a positive impression at many levels. I have to know my stuff, but you don’t do that in superficial interviews. You do that in the literature.

So I think it is important to show I enjoy my life. [Jason] Pontin in Technology Review tried to basically say I was this very circumscribed individual, and I looked as though I wasn’t enjoying my life, drinking too much beer. Outrageous. That pissed me off a lot. [laughs]

Wired.com: That you drink too much beer?

de Grey: Yeah, I mean how would they know how much is too much?

Wired.com: Yeah, especially since you’re basically a 30-year-old on the inside.

de Grey: Quite. It works. I drink exactly the right amount of beer evidently. [laughs] It’s ridiculous, really. Yet, I have to show I’m enjoying my life. It’s public knowledge I am polyamorous as well. That’s something that goes down not so well with some of my more politically sensitive friends and colleagues. But it goes quite well with some other people. [laughs]

Aubrey on Colbert

Aubrey: Old people are still people

Aubrey de Grey in Cato Unbound: Old People Are People Too: Why It Is Our Duty to Fight Aging to the Death:

It has been obvious to me since my earliest days that the eventually fatal physiological decline associated with getting older is both tragic and potentially preventable by medical intervention. It was, therefore, a matter of some consternation to me to discover in my late twenties that my view on this matter was not universally shared. In this essay I explode various myths and illogicalities that surround the effort to combat (and especially to defeat) aging, with an emphasis on some that are often perpetrated by currently influential commentators.

Aubrey mentioned on SNL

New Scientist video featuring de Grey, Bostrom and Sandberg

Check out this New Scientist video featuring Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom and Aubrey de Grey. Topics discussed include transhumanism, whole brain emulation and radical life extension.

Crafting the practical case for life extension in Chicago

This past Monday July 23 the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies conducted a short but intense one day symposium on securing the longevity dividend. The event was held at the picturesque Fairmont Hotel in Chicago and attended by about 40 passionate enthusiasts from a diverse set of backgrounds.

Rather than choosing to wax philosophical about the ethical imperatives in favour of life extension, the organizers of the IEET symposium specifically geared the event around the work of Jay Olshansky and his efforts to frame the discussion in more practical terms.

In other words, money.

Indeed, the case for a longevity dividend – the idea that prolonging life will save not just lives, but oodles of cash -- is beginning to take shape. As Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey noted, “It's a way of rebranding the quest for extending human lives in a politically palatable way.”

Among the many alarming statistics presented by Olshansky, he noted that as a person ages their risk of dying doubles every 7 years. And as the expense required to keep people alive continues to escalate, society could be in for some serious economic trouble. Olshansky estimates that by 2030 the medical costs in the U.S. alone will reach a staggering $16,000,000,000,000.

To deal with this pending crisis, Olshansky suggests that we need to keep people healthy by working to develop more meaningful interventions in life extension, whether it be genetics, insights gained from the effects of caloric restriction, or the development of compounds with properties that appear to slow aging. Ultimately, the goal is to extend maximum healthy life span and drive medical costs down.

At the same time, Olshansky critiqued the tendency towards an explicit “anti-aging” sentiment. Quite interestingly, he sees aging as a positive and wisdom-endowing process. His goal is more modest than those of the transhumanists who which to eliminate death altogether. Instead, Olshansky urges that we should simply strive to extend maximize healthy lifespan as much as possible.

In terms of increasing life expectancy, both Olshansky and the transhumanists are on the same page; it is agreed that work needs to be done to reduce the ravages of aging as much as possible. It is also agreed that the word needs to get out. Money is the language of politics, and while they may not understand the intricacies of biogerontology or the ethics of prolonging life, politicians can most assuredly understand the impact on the bottom dollar.

But not everyone at the symposium agreed with Olshansky. Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, while supportive of Olshansky’s work, was skeptical that a focus on the longevity dividend would result in a decrease in medical costs. As de Grey argued, there will still be costs -- if not considerable costs -- even in a world in which senescence has been greatly retarded. The goal, says de Grey, is to work towards the development of anti-aging interventions intended to eliminate death altogether.

Regarding public support, de Grey urged that more PR work needs to be done on his behalf; Aubrey wants better funding. He mentioned his supreme disinterest in politics and politicians, who he believes are merely looking towards the next election and pandering to the needs of their constituency. The trick, he says, is to sway these constituencies on the side of life extension.

As for de Grey’s talk itself, it was vintage caffeine-inspired Aubrey -- but this time he was also full of piss and vinegar. It was angry Aubrey, on the offense and lashing out at those critics who he accused of being dismissive of his work out of sheer incredulity and little else. He eventually returned to more substantive issues by addressing Olshansky’s longevity dividend and his own work, including his upcoming book, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs that Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime.

Also speaking at the event was economist David Meltzer who dazzled attendees with abstract renderings of economics equations and high economic concept. Anders Sandberg worked to frame more meaningful policy scenarios as they pertain to life extension; Ronald Bailey spoke of the political economy; I presented a summation and taxonomy of arguments both for and against life extension; and James Hughes demonstrated how coalitions should be built for anti-aging science and medicine by turning the symposium into a collaborative workshop.

The life extension community continues to take strides by expanding and attracting more effective allies. And by doing so it is acquiring a powerful arsenal of ethical, legal, political and economic rationales to support the claim for longer life.

The case for radical life extension continues to mature.

Read Ronald Bailey’s recap of the symposium.