Aubrey de Grey

At a glance

• Aubrey de Grey is an English biomedical gerontologist. He wrote The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and, with Michael Rae, Ending Aging (2007).
• He is known for SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence): the idea that ageing consists of seven types of accumulated damage, such as cell loss, senescent cells and waste products, each of which might be repaired separately.
• He co-founded the Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation.
• Since 2022 he has led the LEV Foundation, which funds mouse studies testing several rejuvenation interventions at once.
• He champions ‘longevity escape velocity’: if therapies improve fast enough, people would no longer need to die of old age. Many ageing researchers consider his timelines too optimistic.
• As an amateur mathematician he made progress on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem in graph theory in 2018.
• Takeaway: his ‘damage repair’ framework helps in understanding ageing, but always judge concrete promises on evidence in humans.