From Love, A Crusade
The man who brought them together began his career as a computer
scientist, working for several years on programs that find bugs in
other programs. He later received his Ph.D. in biology from the
University of Cambridge and devoted himself, in a sense, to finding the
bugs in human beings.
An important turning point in Mr. de Grey's personal and professional
life occurred at a friend's party in 1990. That's when he met Adelaide
Carpenter, who would later become Adelaide de Grey. When they met, Mr.
de Grey was a computer scientist in his twenties and had never been
married. His wife-to-be was in her forties and had been married twice
before. Despite the 19-year age difference, they fell for each other
immediately and have been together ever since.
At the time, Ms. de Grey was on sabbatical from her position as a
professor of genetics at the University of California at San Diego. She
had already established her reputation in the discipline (and made some
discoveries that are now in textbooks) and had a comfortable, tenured
position. But she had grown tired of her research and her job. So,
after she met Mr. de Grey, she decided to quit, move to Cambridge, and
work as a technician in a fruit-fly laboratory. It was a big step down
professionally, but she enjoyed her work and the company of her new
husband.
The age difference was unimportant to Ms. de Grey: What mattered to her
was intellectual compatibility. "I need my male partner to be smarter
than I am," she explains. "And — I'm trying to be modest here — that
narrows down the field quite a bit." Does her husband fit that bill?
She nods vigorously. "Oh yes."
Ms. de Grey taught her husband genetics over the dinner table. She was
amazed at how quickly he could absorb the concepts. "Very shortly we
were able to have a conversation rather than a tutorial," she says.
While talking about her academic career and her relationship, Ms. de
Grey is puffing away steadily on an unfiltered Camel. Mr. de Grey would
like her to quit, but she's been a smoker since she was a teenager and
believes that nicotine is necessary to kick-start her brain. Unlike her
husband, Ms. de Grey has no wish to live forever. She has not agreed to
be cryogenically frozen when she dies. (Mr. de Grey has, just in case
medicine does not advance speedily enough to save him.)
"I don't think anyone would want to thaw me out," she says and smiles,
revealing a mouth mostly devoid of teeth.
When the software project Mr. de Grey had been working on didn't pan
out, he got a part-time job designing a database for fruit-fly
researchers at the lab where his wife worked. It is a position he still
holds; as it turns out, being a prophet is not a sufficiently
remunerative profession. In 1995, after having absorbed a great deal of
genetics, Mr. de Grey moved on to gerontology, a subject that had
always intrigued him. For two months he immersed himself in the
literature. He emerged with an insight into the mechanics of
mitochondrial mutations, wrote a paper on what he thought, and
submitted it to a respected journal.
It was accepted. He was off to a good start.
Mr. de Grey continued reading widely on the subject and soon came to
the conclusion that not much was being done. "I assumed that everyone
was beavering away on aging," he says. "But it gradually occurred to me
that I might be wrong about that." The field, he believed, needed him.
"Gerontology has more than its share of not terribly bright people," he
says. That's because, according to Mr. de Grey, progress is
incremental, so there's less chance for a young researcher to make a
big splash, and consequently, the best minds go elsewhere.
One will not find Mr. de Grey in the laboratory hovering over petri
dishes or test tubes. He readily acknowledges that he lacks the
qualifications to perform experiments. What some might view as a
handicap, he sees as a strength: Rather than spending his time behind a
microscope, he reads the literature and searches for connections that a
specialist may have missed.
Buoyed by his early success, Mr. de Grey started thinking bigger. He
came to believe that most people in the world, including most
scientists, are in a "pro-aging trance." That is, they believe that
getting old is awful but inevitable and therefore it is best not to
think about it. But what if aging were preventable? What if death were
not a foregone conclusion?
He is not the first person to propose such an idea. But a couple of
things set Aubrey de Grey apart from other eternal-life prophets. For
starters, he is a bona fide scholar. Other researchers can, and often
do, disagree with his conclusions, but they also acknowledge that he
knows what he is talking about.
Also, Mr. de Grey is not hawking a product or hustling investors for
some biotech start-up. He does raise money to fund the Methuselah
Foundation, which among other things is responsible for the Methuselah
Mouse Prize (awarded to the scientific research team that develops the
longest-living mouse), and for the Institute of Biomedical Gerontology,
which at this stage is just a proposal. But he's not trying to get
rich. And the apparent purity of his motives, along with a genuine
grasp of the science, is part of his appeal.
A Bounty on His Theory
He also has a talent for drumming up publicity. His eccentricities (the
long beard, the thrift-store clothes, the pub crawling) appeal to
journalists looking for a colorful feature subject. There is also his
willingness — eagerness, in fact — to explain his plan for fighting
aging to any reporter with a notebook and time to kill. More publicity,
he hopes, will lead to more donations. The donations can then be used
to help finance the kinds of research Mr. de Grey believes are most
important.
Not every article, however, has taken a gee-whiz tone. In February,
Technology Review, which is owned by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, published an article about Mr. de Grey along with an
editorial written by Jason Pontin, the magazine's editor. The article,
by Sherwin Nuland, a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University's
School of Medicine and the author of How We Die, concluded that Mr. de
Grey was "neither a madman nor a bad man" but that his plan "will
almost certainly not succeed." And, even if it did, Mr. de Grey "would
surely destroy us in attempting to preserve us" because living for such
long periods would undermine what it means to be human.
The editorial took a more ad hominem approach. Mr. Pontin wrote that
Mr. de Grey "drinks too much beer" and that even though he's just in
his early 40s "the signs of decay are strongly marked on his face." He
also called the potential social consequences of extending life
indefinitely "terrible" and wrote that Mr. de Grey "thinks he is a
technological messiah."
The response to the article and the editorial was extraordinary and
extremely negative. Mr. Pontin says he has received thousands of e-mail
messages, many of them from "enraged" readers. "It was as if I was
personally depriving them of the possibility of immortality," he says.
The online version of the article has been clicked on nearly a million
times, making it by far the most-read article in the history of the
magazine.
Readers criticized the magazine for dismissing Mr. de Grey's ideas as
ludicrous without ever fully engaging with them. Because of the
enormous and unexpected reaction, Mr. Pontin decided to do something
unusual: He commissioned Cynthia Kenyon, a professor of biochemistry
and biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco and
director of the Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging, to review Mr.
de Grey's ideas and write a follow-up. Ms. Kenyon is well-known among
gerontologists and has made some important discoveries of her own. By
altering a gene in a roundworm, she extended its life span from two
weeks to 20 weeks, which may or may not have implications for humans.
Ms. Kenyon agreed to write the article and then, three months later,
she backed out. Why she did this remains unclear. She declined a
telephone interview with The Chronicle, citing a hectic travel
schedule, but in an e-mail message wrote that she was "overwhelmed with
other commitments then and didn't have time to do a good job."
Mr. Pontin then decided to put a bounty of sorts on Mr. de Grey,
offering $10,000 to any gerontologist who could prove to an independent
review panel that his ideas about radical life-extension had no merit.
Mr. de Grey then upped the ante, matching the $10,000 through his
Methuselah Foundation, making the prize for debunking him a generous
$20,000.
You might think researchers would be lining up. In fact, no: So far Mr.
Pontin has had no takers. He has also had trouble finding scientists
willing to sit on the independent panel. Mr. de Grey sees the entire
episode as a giant victory, particularly the fact that a prominent
scientist such as Ms. Kenyon took up the project, then abandoned it.
This is proof, he says, that "they can't ignore me any longer."
For Mr. Pontin, it is all somewhat exasperating. "People want to stay
as far away from this as possible," he sighs. "If he's as crazy as
people say, then even in lieu of experimental data, it should be
possible to get someone to say why he's crazy."
Outrunning Death
"Aubrey's always arguing against people who tell him he's crazy," says
Graham Pawelec, a professor of experimental immunology at the
University of Tübingen in Germany. "I have never heard him lose an
argument."
Mr. Pawelec is one of Mr. de Grey's staunch supporters. He quotes him
often, beginning sentences by saying "Remember what Aubrey tells us ...
." He puts a lot of stock in Mr. de Grey's "escape velocity" theory.
This is, in short, the idea that in the next 10 or 20 years science
will have advanced sufficiently to allow people to live for, say, 150
or 200 years. And then by the time those people turn 200, science will
have figured out how to allow them to live to 500. It is not that the
battle against aging will be over shortly, but that there will be
enough steady progress so that we can all live forever. More or less.
"In 10 years, we will have proof that we can cure these seven things
and therefore beat aging," says Mr. Pawelec, who spoke at the
conference on "immunorejuvenation" in the elderly. "All of my
mainstream colleagues will be up there saying Aubrey was right. And
then the general public will believe it."
But, even at Mr. de Grey's own conference, there was no shortage of
doubters. Among them was David Finkelstein, program administrator for
the Metabolic Regulation Program at the National Institute on Aging. He
came to the conference, he says, because it attracts "some of the most
creative scientists around." But he is definitely not one of Mr. de
Grey's acolytes. "Is there a kernel of truth in what Aubrey says?
Absolutely. Will it happen in the short term?" Mr. Finkelstein shakes
his head. "To say if we solve these seven things we'll live to 1,000?
That's hyperbole. I don't like hyperbole."
Mr. Finkelstein has little respect for Mr. de Grey's own research
contributions. "I am very underwhelmed," he says. The fact that Mr. de
Grey does not set foot inside a laboratory also bothers him: "Look, you
either work at the bench, or you don't work at the bench," he says.
Some of Mr. de Grey's more extreme statements make it hard to take him
seriously, according to Mr. Finkelstein: "There are people who say that
if Aubrey says it must be right then it must be wrong." At the same
time, despite his criticism, Mr. Finkelstein has some appreciation for
Mr. de Grey's role as provocateur. "I like him," he says. "He ruffles
feathers. He has the balls to say stuff."
The question is whether that stuff will prove to be true. Gregory M.
Fahy, a biologist and vice president and chief scientific officer of
21st Century Medicine, a biomedical research company, was very
skeptical at first. While they still do not agree on everything, Mr.
Fahy has been largely won over. And, like Mr. Finkelstein, he respects
Mr. de Grey for his courage in the face of ridicule. "If you think
you're right, you have to stand up and say what you believe even if
people think you're nuts," says Mr. Fahy. "Now, if they prove you're
nuts, you have to shut up. But that hasn't happened yet."
HOW TO CURE AGING
Aubrey de Grey has a seven-step plan he says will "cure" aging and
allow people to live for a very long time. Here it is:
1
The problem: Cell loss or atrophy
Mr. de Grey's solution: Develop stem cells to replace lost cells. Or
use chemicals that stimulate the division of cells to produce new ones.
2
The problem: Cancer
Mr. de Grey's solution: Aggressive gene therapy will make it impossible
for cancer cells to reproduce. Stem-cell therapy will prevent side
effects.
3
The problem: Mitochondrial mutations
Mr. de Grey's solution: Mitochondria are the cell's power plants, and
they house separate genes that are prone to harmful mutations that
cause diseases. To prevent those problems, copy the critical
mitochondrial genes and insert the copies in the cell's nucleus, where
they will be better protected.
4
The problem: Unwanted cells (such as fat cells)
Mr. de Grey's solution: Possibly stimulate the immune system to kill
unwanted cells.
5
The problem: Stiffening of proteins outside the cell
Mr. de Grey's solution: Proteins outside cells help support tissues,
making arteries elastic and ligaments strong. But chemical reactions
throughout life link those proteins and make them less mobile. Specific
chemicals could break those links and allow the proteins to move more
easily. One chemical is already in clinical trials, says Mr. de Grey.
6
The problem: "Junk" outside the cell
Mr. de Grey's solution: Plaques accumulate outside the cell and may
lead to diseases such as Alzheimer's. Small molecules called
beta-breakers may break these plaques down.
7
The problem: "Junk" inside the cell
Mr. de Grey's solution: As cells age, molecules can change in ways that
make them stop working. Those structures can accumulate in cells and
and eventually overwhelm them. Extra enzymes from bacteria could be
given to cells to degrade the unwanted material.
More details can be found on his Web site:
(http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/AdGbio.htm)
En fait, je me demande de plus enplus s'il ne s'agit pas tout simplement d'un canular ?
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