In “So You Want to Live Forever,” an article that came out in the May 12, 2014 issue of the
Weekly Standard, contributor Charlotte Allen reports on her interview with the British-born Aubrey de Grey, 51, who is arguably the single most colorful figure in the living-forever movement. Grey, with a doctorate in biology from Cambridge to his name, insists that within a few decades technology will enable human beings to beat death and live forever. “Someone is alive right now who is going to live to be 1,000 years old,” he told Allen during the interview at Grey’s SENS Research Foundation headquarters—SENS stands for “Strategically Engineered Negligible Senescence”—in Silicon Valley in California.
BY DAVE MALAN FOR WEEKLY STANDARD
For people to ultimately wear themselves out and die isn’t an inevitable part of the human condition, Grey argues; instead, he insists that aging is just another disease that has a cure or series of cures that scientists will eventually discover. “Aging is a side effect of being alive,” he told Allen. “The human body is exactly the same as a car or an airplane. It’s a machine, and any machine, if you run it, will effect changes on itself that require repairs. Living systems have a great deal of capacity for self-repair, but over time some of those changes only accumulate very slowly, so we don’t notice them until we are very old.”
Like most people, Allen is not really sold to Grey’s claim that aging is a disease awaiting a cure, but she concedes that the scientific quest for immortality of the kind that Grey is pursuing has at least produced some beneficial side effects, like a better understanding of how to stay in reasonably good health for as long as possible.
Read Charlotte Allen’s “So You Want to Live Forever” in the Weekly Standard now!RELATED EARLIER READING IN THE FORUM:What would happen if it became possible for people to live forever? British philosophy and science writer Stephen Cave closely examines some of the familiar disquieting answers to this monumental question in his book
Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization.
Read “The striving for eternal life and its terrifying downside” in the Forum now!
