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Who is Aubrey de Grey?

Aubrey de Grey was born in London, England in 1963. He is a controversial author and theoretician in the field of gerontology and is currently serving as a chief science officer at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) foundation.

Dr. de Grey started out as a computer scientist by completing a BA at Cambridge University in 1985. According to his own words he married a biologist and decided to switch fields in the mid 1990s. In the year 2000 Cambridge University awarded him a PhD for his book concerning a specific aspect of aging called The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging.

Aubrey de Grey is an eccentric, controversial and highly recognizable figure. He has been a guest speaker for numerous TV programs and events such as CBS 60 Minutes, BBC, the New York Times, Fortune Magazine, the Washington Post, TED, Popular Science and The Colbert Report. Most recently this controversial gerontologist was the subject of Christopher Syke's documentary film Do You Want to Live Forever?

It is in his second book called Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime where Aubrey de Grey proposes a road-map aimed at defeating aging by reaching what he calls longevity escape velocity -- i.e. the point where humanity will possess the medical technology to extend healthy human life by a given period of time (e.g. a decade or two) during which time we will come up with even better technology thereby allowing us to extend life even more. Thus, by repeating this process over and over again we can stay one step ahead of the problem of aging and eventually will reach a point where we can extend healthy human life indefinitely.

Maybe it is because of his background in computer science that Dr. de Grey perceives the human body as a very complicated machine. Therefore, he argues that aging is primarily an engineering problem. Thus once we grasp all the finer details of our biological structure then the problem of aging becomes one of maintenance and just like today we are capable to maintain vintage cars or airplanes indefinitely he believes that eventually we'll be able to do so with our bodies.