About eternal youth
7 questions to Aubrey de Grey, gerontologist
Andrey Konstantinov, "Russian Reporter" No. 26-2015
Aubrey de Grey, Director of Science at the SENS Foundation, who is probably the world's most famous researcher of aging and an anti–aging propagandist, came to Moscow for the Open Innovations Forum. We asked the scientist what the research foundation he heads does.
How would you describe your mission, life's work and main goal?My mission is to put all aspects of aging under the full control of medicine.
So that people, no matter how long they have lived, feel mentally and physically like young adults feel.
Do you have a plan to save humanity?Our plan is an approach based on the concept of damage repair.
Throughout life, a lot of things break down in the human body – this is a side effect of the functioning of the body. There are many different types of breakdowns - each of them individually may not be very dangerous, but their cumulative effect kills us. The main task of the SENS Foundation is to learn how to repair all these types of damage. We are simultaneously doing several projects related to the development of drugs for different types of damage. There is no hierarchy here - all these types of damage become deadly at about the same time, and it is important to learn how to repair them all. Each of our projects has its own development plan – tests on mice and so on.
What are the main types of breakdowns?The first type is the loss of cells, as in Parkinson's disease.
Cells die, and they are not automatically replaced by young cells. Another type occurs with cancer: here, on the contrary, there are too many cells, they multiply uncontrollably. There is another type of breakdown, when there are too many cells, if they do not die after serving their time. It is especially important to die in time for the cells of the immune system that have become unusable in order to make room for new ones, and this problem appears in old age for everyone. In addition, there are two important types of intracellular damage at the molecular level. These are, firstly, mutations in mitochondria, cellular organelles responsible for cell respiration. Mitochondria have their own DNA, in which errors accumulate throughout life. And, secondly, the accumulation of waste products of its vital activity inside the cell, all kinds of garbage. The cell lacks mechanisms to get rid of it – this eventually causes atherosclerosis, many heart diseases or retinal degeneration – one of the main causes of blindness in old age.
And there is also damage in the intercellular space. This is also, first of all, the accumulation of waste, such as amyloids, which cause Alzheimer's disease. In addition, in the intercellular space there is a so-called extracellular matrix made of proteins, it is elastic, can stretch, which is very important for blood pressure control. But in old age, too many bonds are gradually formed between the protein molecules that make up the matrix. Its elasticity is broken and this causes high pressure. We have to learn how to repair all these damages.
Are you researching all this yourself? Themselves.
But, of course, we use the developments obtained by other groups. And we don't focus, for example, on stem cell therapy, although it's a great way to repair cell loss. It's just that a lot of researchers are already doing this. But the creation of therapy for most of the injuries I have described requires a lot of research, and there are absolutely not enough of them in the world so far. That's why we created SENS. This is a charitable foundation, people donate money to us. I give lectures all over the world, give a lot of interviews, someone begins to be interested in our activities, understands its importance and begins to sponsor us. Now we spend $5 million a year, and we need to do research for $50 million a year.
Are there any results already?We have many articles published in the leading scientific journals of the world.
Here, a week ago, an article was published in Science, just about the connection between the extracellular matrix and pressure. And a couple of years ago, we showed that we could take a gene from a bacterium and embed it into a human cell that would protect white blood cells from toxic cholesterol molecules that cause atherosclerosis. Now we are bringing this technology to mind.
How do you assess our chances of making it to radical life extension?I think they are, let it be 50-50.
If our work is successful and research funding eventually increases dramatically, truly effective anti-aging therapies will appear in 20-25 years. I will be 75 now, but they will be effective at this age.
If we stop dying of old age, won't there be a problem of overpopulation?In short, the planet's capacity to accommodate people will grow much faster than the population due to rapid progress in areas such as the use of renewable energy, the production of artificial meat, the development of the oceans.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
10.12.2015