Aubrey de Grey is no stranger to scientific controversies. His belief that a range of "maintenance" treatments--ranging from stem cell therapies to gene therapy, immune stimulation and other new technologies--will allow today's newborns to live 150 years has been denounced as pseudo science. But not everyone is so sure that de Grey's ideas are all that outlandish.
"This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health," the investigator--the CSO at Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Foundation--tells Reuters. "This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age. The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health."
De Grey's work is based on the wear and tear of molecular and cellular damage over the years. By preventing the damage, he expects to greatly increase the average life span. In some species specific enzymes do the work of cellular cleaning and de Grey believes that similar gene therapies can be developed for humans.
Taking the same approach and advancing it by two decades, de Grey says that by 2030 a newborn might achieve a life span of 1,000 years. "But there really shouldn't be any limit imposed by how long ago you were born. The whole point of maintenance is that it works indefinitely."
- here's the story from Reuters