#423 Top Longevity Scientist Predicts Dramatic Life Extension by 2035 - Aubrey de Grey

Aubrey de Grey (0:00)

Repairing the body, actually reversing, reducing biological age, is likely to be a lot easier than slowing aging down. If we get to this whole year of extension of life from starting in middle age, then we are going to have a full-blown full-scale war on aging.

Siim Land (0:17)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. Our guest today is Dr. Aubrey de Grey. Aubrey is one of the world's leading gerontologists. He's spearheading foundations that seek to extend human lifespan. In this episode, we talk about his predictions regarding the Longevity Escape Velocity, which is a concept where medical science has reached a point you'll be able to outpace aging.

Aubrey, welcome to the show.

Aubrey de Grey (0:40)

Well, thank you for having me.

Siim Land (0:42)

Yeah, I'm super excited and honored to have you on the show. I've read a lot of your books and I'm also a huge, I guess like a fan of the idea of the Longevity Escape Velocity. Coincidentally, it's actually been like 20 years since you published the first paper on this topic or where you coined the term. So it's kind of two decades have passed. So what are yours? Let's say we can begin with like, you can maybe explain it a little bit of what you wrote 20 years ago and maybe how has your opinion about this changed 20 years later.

Aubrey de Grey (1:18)

Sure. Yeah. Okay. So the idea of Longevity Escape Velocity, which as you say, I first talked about in 2004, arose from the big idea I had four years earlier, which was that repairing the body, actually reversing, reducing biological age, is likely to be a lot easier than slowing aging down. In other words, slowing down the rate at which biological age increases. And that has of course dominated and defined my scientific research ever since. It's remarkable how well the plan that I put forward back then, which was first published in 2002, has stood the test of time. I have not had any requirement to expand my original list of seven deadly things, as I called them.

And that means that it's quite likely that nobody will ever have to expand that list, and that once we can develop ways to actually do the damage repair in each of those cases, we will be in a very good position. So how does longevity escape velocity arise from all of that? Well, it is a consequence of the fact that rejuvenation, reducing of biological age, buys time. The slowing down of biological aging is better than nothing, but if you're already in middle age when one starts to do that, then one doesn't actually gain very much. Well, actually one gets sick anyway. Whereas if you take someone who's, let's say, 60 or 70, and you restore them to being biologically 40 or something, then it's going to be another 20 years before they get to be biologically 60 again. And that's time that people like me can spend improving the therapies. The reason one would not take someone aged 60 or 70 back to biologically 20 is because the initial damage repair portfolio is not going to be 100% comprehensive. We are going to be able to fix some things more easily than others, but there's going to be some easy damage we can fix, some difficult damage we can't fix. And what's going to happen, therefore, is that when the person comes in aged biologically 60 for the second time, when they're 80 or whatever, they're actually not really going to be biologically 60, because all the damage that makes them biologically 60 is going to be difficult damage that the therapies don't work on, which means that however often and thoroughly we apply these therapies, the person is still going to get older biologically, which is not the idea, right? So the point is that in those 20 years, we will have improved the comprehensiveness of the rejuvenation, which means that those same people, even though they're full of difficult damage, can be re-rejuvenated, because we've shifted some of the difficult damage into the easy category, so to speak, and so they won't be biologically 60 for the third time until they're, let's say, chronologically 110 and so on. So the formal definition of longevity escape velocity is simply, it's the minimum rate at which we need to, the scientists need to be improving the comprehensiveness of these therapies in order to stay one step ahead of the problem for people who are getting the state-of-the-art therapies at any particular point. And we never have to get 100% perfect at repairing damage, we just have to approach 100% sufficiently fast. Furthermore, the rather heartening thing is that, that rate at which we have to approach 100% slows down over time. This is not a case of, you know, accelerating change like the singularity, because the more that we can fix, the less that we have left that we can't fix, the longer it's going to take for that ultra-difficult damage to become abundant enough to cause us to get sick. So this means that once we reach Longevity Escape Velocity for the first time, the hard part is definitely done. It's vanishingly unlikely that we will ever fall below Longevity Escape Velocity after that. So somebody, a friend of mine, back in about 2007 coined the term the Methuselarity by contrast with the Singularity to define this one point. So you ask, the last part of your question was, how have my views changed? There's one thing that's changed a little bit in relation to all of this, and that is with regard to how soon we're going to reach Longevity Escape Velocity. In particular, how much we are going to have to postpone the health problems of late life in order to be at the Methuselarity in the first place. Originally, I said, I thought we would probably need 30 years.