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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.

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...

The curious case of the catatonic biogerontologists The SENS strategy as described here purports to have all the characteristics that should make it persuasive: it's detailed, it's thorough and it's all firmly based on established experimental work in the various relevant areas of biology. So, you may well ask, where's the catch? Why, on all the many documentaries on aging that remain so popular, don't my colleagues come out and advocate the work that I advocate? There are three main reasons why most mainstream gerontologists remain so conspicuously absent from the growing band of vocal advocates of the SENS approach...

(Note: The original article is replete with in-text links and visual aids; please visit it in order to access those links.) SENS is a practical, foreseeable approach to curing aging because all the types of metabolic side-effect whose accumulation is (or is even hypothesised to be) eventually pathogenic are amenable to repair (or in some cases obviation, i.e. disruption of the mechanism by which they become pathogenic) by techniques that, according to the experimentalists who have performed the key work on which those techniques build, can (with adequate funding) probably be implemented in mice within a decade or so. There...

(Note: The original article is replete with in-text links; please visit it in order to access those links.) What is Engineered Negligible Sensecence? "It's not a very catchy name, is it?" you may be thinking. Yes, I know -- "Engineered Negligible Senescence" has ten syllables and is not the world's most memorable, or indeed self-explanatory, phrase. But it is a good name for our ultimate goal, honest -- as well as SENS being a catchy acronym. Here's an explanation. I'm afraid it starts with a rather long preamble, but trust me, it's worth it. First, let's be precise: our ultimate...