Free Republic

When it comes to business projections, Silicon Valley is the home of the tall story. Unbridled ambitions, unfettered thinking and a belief in the boundless potential of technology produce a steady crop of outlandish expectations. Yet even by Silicon Valley standards the prediction that there are people alive today who will live for 1,000 years is extreme. It conjures less the bold pronouncement of a leading biotech pioneer than the ramblings of a mad professor....

Summary: Scientists have identified synergistic cellular pathways for longevity that amplify lifespan fivefold in C. elegans, a nematode worm used as a model in aging research. The increase in lifespan would be the equivalent of a human living for 400 or 500 years, according to one of the scientists. Share: Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory, in collaboration with scientists from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, Calif., and Nanjing University in China, have identified synergistic cellular pathways for longevity that amplify lifespan fivefold in C. elegans, a nematode worm used as a model in aging research....

Professional biologist and amateur mathematician Aubrey de Grey has partially solved the Hadwiger-Nelson problem, which has vexed mathematicians since 1950. He has published a paper describing the solution on the arXiv preprint server. The Hadwiger-Nelson problem came about when Edward Nelson and Hugo Hadwiger wondered about the smallest number of colors necessary to color all of the points on a graph, with no two connected points using the same color. Over the years, mathematicians have attacked the problem, and have narrowed the possibilities down to four, five, six or seven. Now, de Grey has eliminated the possibility of four colors...

Aubrey de Grey may be wrong but, evidence suggests, he's not nuts. This is a no small assertion. De Grey argues that some people alive today will live in a robust and youthful fashion for 1,000 years.

Do You Want to Live Forever? By Sherwin Nuland Febuary 2005 Wandering through the quadrangles and medieval bastions of learning at the University of Cambridge one overcast Sunday afternoon a few months ago, I found myself ruminating on how this venerable place had been a crucible for the scientific revolution that changed humankind’s perceptions of itself and of the world. The notion of Cambridge as a source of grand transformative concepts was very much on my mind that day, because I had traveled to England to meet a contemporary Cantabrigian who aspires to a historical role similar to those...

Controversial theorist Aubrey de Grey insists that we are within reach of an engineered cure for aging. Are you prepared to live forever? On this glorious spring day in Cambridge, England, the heraldic flags are flying from the stone towers, and I feel like I could be in the 17th century—or, as I pop into the Eagle Pub to meet University of Cambridge longevity theorist Aubrey de Grey, the 1950s. It was in this pub, after all, that James Watson and Francis Crick met regularly for lunch while they were divining the structure of DNA and where, in February 1953,...

Life expectancy is increasing in the developed world. But Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey believes it will soon extend dramatically to 1,000. Here, he explains why. Ageing is a physical phenomenon happening to our bodies, so at some point in the future, as medicine becomes more and more powerful, we will inevitably be able to address ageing just as effectively as we address many diseases today. I claim that we are close to that point because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing. It is not just an idea: it's a very...