Someone already born will ‘live to 1,000 and immortality IS possible’
A DOCTOR who has dedicated his work to the quest for eternal life insists the record for the oldest living person will soon fall and someone already alive will keep going until they make 1,000.
By JON AUSTIN PUBLISHED: 04:21, Sun, May 1, 2016 | UPDATED: 08:56, Sun, May 1, 2016
Could people ever really live until 1,000 or more?
Dr Aubrey de Grey believes people who have already been born could live for ten centuries because of ongoing research being done into “repairing the effects of ageing.”
He hopes to ultimately create preventative treatments that mean humans would be able to consistently re-repair and live as long as 1,000 years or possible even forever.
British-born Mr de Grey, who graduated from Cambridge University in 1985 insists he is one of very few scientists looking at preventing, rather than slowing down ageing, and is perplexed why there is not huge focus on it.
He told the actuary.com: “To me, ageing was the world’s most important problem. It was so obvious that I never tested the assumption. I always presumed that everyone else thought the same.”
But his theory for repairing ageing has not been widely accepted by peers.
He said: “People have this crazy concept that ageing is natural and inevitable, and I have to keep explaining that it is not.
“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.”
Mr de Grey is the co-founder and chief science officer of Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) Research Foundation in California, USA,.
It said: “Decades of research in aging people and experimental animals has established that there are no more than seven major classes of such cellular and molecular damage.
“We can be confident that this list is complete, first and foremost because of the fact that scientists have not discovered any new kinds of aging damage in nearly a generation of research, despite the increasing number of centres and scientists dedicated to studying the matter, and the use of increasingly powerful tools to examine the aging body.
“In its own way, each of these kinds of damage make our bodies frail, and contribute to the rising frailty and ill-health that appears in our sixth decade of life and accelerates thereafter.
“SENS Research Foundation’s strategy to prevent and reverse age-related ill-health is to apply the principles of regenerative medicine to repair the damage of aging at the level where it occurs.
“We are developing a new kind of medicine: regenerative therapies that remove, repair, replace, or render harmless the cellular and molecular damage that has accumulated in our tissues with time.
People have this crazy concept that ageing is natural and inevitable, and I have to keep explaining that it is not.
Aubrey de Grey
“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 aging tissues to health and bringing back the body’s youthful vigor.”
But, with donors like Google and Paypal, the charity organisation has raised millions of dollars to continue its hopeful research, and it has come in for criticism from mainstream scientists over ethics and feasibility.
Dr Tilo Kunath, of the Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, branded Mr de-Grey 100 per cent wrong and said it was impossible for anyone to live longer than around 120 now or in the near future.
He said: “Many people put up prizes for anyone who can come up with the secret, Google has put up prizes, but Mr de_grey is wrong. He should be able to do it with an animal.
“But it can’t even be done with a mouse. The only way to do it extend will extend its life by 30 per cent, and that is by restricting its diet, so he is 100 per cent wrong.”
He said our bodies were hardwired like a ticking clock for cells to start dying from a certain age.
He said: “The idea of extending human life to 150 or 200 years would just not be possible with the genetics we have.
“No one in the future could be genetically modified for a human to live longer than say 120 years.
“You couldn’t even do it through diet or medicine, no not within the next 100 years.”
But the expert on Parkinson’s Disease is convinced we will see preventative medicines for dementia and other diseases.
He said the medicines would “prevent the misfolding of proteins that cause many signs and diseases of aging”.
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