SPEAKER: So I am introducing Aubrey de Grey,

who is the chief science officer of the SENS Research

Foundation.

And he is a major force in aging research,

and I'm very excited to hear this talk.

[APPLAUSE]

AUBREY DE GREY: All right, thank you all for coming.

Glad to see so many of you here.

Yeah, there's only five books left over there.

That's about-- there were 20 when we came into the room,

so hurry.

But yeah, and I'm happy to sign them

if you really want to be a terribly fanboy kind of person

later on.

All right, so yes, so I've got an hour,

so I'm going to try and tell you as much as I can about

what we do at SENS Research Foundation.

And why, and why it's important and why

you should be supporting it and how you can support it.

And there are various ways you can do that.

I'm going to start by giving you a really top-level idea,

because I know, obviously, most of you

don't have very much in the way of biology training.

I'm going to start by saying why I think this

is such an important problem.

This part of the world, Bay Area,

is really the epicenter of the effective altruism movement,

the movement that really focuses on rationally determining what

is the best way to spend money on humanitarian causes, what

gets the best bang for the buck.

And of course, people try to figure out

what the amount of suffering is that

is caused by this or that problem,

and what it would cost to do something about that.

And they try and figure it out from there.

And a lot of this comes down to the trade-off

between mean and variance.

In other words, between understanding how much good you

can do and understanding the uncertainty as

regards how much good you can do.

So high risk, high reward endeavors,

like pioneering technology, often

get kind of the short end of the stick when

it comes to effective altruism.

Because they don't really offer the confidence,

the certainty, that people like to see

with regard to knowing that what they're doing

is actually beneficial.

And the extreme end of that spectrum

is the situation where you don't know whether the problem is

solvable at all, whether--

it's not just high risk, high reward.

It could be 100% risk.

In other words, you know, zero chance of success,

however large the reward would be.

And the problem with that is zero times anything

is still zero.

So however valuable that the goal might be,

you wouldn't really want to go there.

And certainly the comparison between the defeat of aging

versus various other seriously high profile major issues

today, such as the ones I'm listing on this slide,

you know, that's quite a contrast.

Before I was a biologist, I used to work

in artificial intelligence research.

And the fundamental reason I did so

was that I didn't think that work was a terribly good thing.

You know, I think it's a great shame

that people have to spend so much of their time doing stuff

that they wouldn't do unless they were being paid for it.

And so I decided I wanted to fix that with automation.

And I worked in that area, actually,

in software verification, for several years

before I discovered that the obviously much more serious

problem of aging was actually being worked on very, very

little indeed by biologists.

And I thought that was a bit crap, really,

so I switched fields.

But when I switched fields, I realized-- in fact, actually,

this was actually part of the reason why I switched fields.

I realized that the people who were working on this, which

were, as I said earlier, only a very small minority

of biologists, were going about it

in a rather unimpressive way.

They weren't really going about it as engineers.

They weren't really breaking down

the problem in a structured manner the way

that a programmer might do.

And so that's what I tried to do.

And I started here.

I started with the question, well, look, 200 years ago,

even in the wealthiest countries, more than one-third

of babies would die before the age of one.

More than a third.

And of course in the rest of early life,

you know, in early adulthood, even,

there would be a lot of death.

Childbirth, especially, of course.

And we've pretty much entirely eliminated that now

in the industrialized world.

And of course, we're doing very well in that direction

in the developing world, too.

We've done it by really elementary means,

just by figuring out that hygiene was a good idea,

and by elementary medicines like vaccines and antibiotics.

And of course, even mosquito nets.

You know, these are tiny things.

And they work.

They've saved the most ridiculous number of lives.

But we've made virtually no progress

against the ill health associated with old age.

What's going on?

Why is it so different?

So most people would say that this is the answer.

Don't worry.

You're not supposed to be able to read this slide.

The point here is obviously just that there's

a lot of complexity.

An awful lot of different things go wrong with us late in life,

and they go wrong at more or less the same time, which

means, of course, that they interact with each other.

They exacerbate each other.

The whole thing is a little bit chaotic.

And so most people would say, well, this

is fundamentally what's going on.

The real reason why aging has remained so hard

to tackle with medicine is the sheer complexity

of the business.

The fact that there's so much going on,

it's just overwhelmed the ability of the medical research

community.

Now, there is a lot of truth in that.

That is definitely part of the problem.

But what you've got to know is that it's not

the main part of the problem.

There's a more fundamental reason

why aging has been hard to tackle,

and I'm going to deal with what that is.

I'm going to start by defining aging.

This turns out to be actually pretty tricky.

So [? Bjork, ?] who's hosting me today,

actually got an email this morning saying, listen,

we don't want to fix aging.

You know, we think it's a good thing.

We want to get older and more knowledgeable and all that kind

of stuff.

Of course we bloody do.

That's fairly obvious.

I mean, the point, obviously, is that we

want to get rid of the bad parts of aging

and thereby perpetuate and enhance the good parts.

So aging, for the purposes of this talk,

will mean the bad parts of aging.

So aging is not something specific to biology.

You can look at certain aspects of biology, especially

human biology, and you can say, well, in some sense,

they are emergent phenomena.

You know, consciousness.

You know, rocks are not conscious.

Cars are not conscious.

We knew that, right?

But aging is actually not an emergent phenomenon.

Aging is a phenomenon that is fundamentally

the same in living organisms as it

is in any man-made machine with moving parts,

like the car or an airplane.

It is simply a fact of physics that any machine with moving

parts is going to do itself damage throughout its existence

as an inevitable consequence of its normal operation.

It's just a fact of physics.

And that damage is going to accumulate.

And that's fine for a while, because any machine,

living or not, is set up to tolerate

a certain amount of damage.

And so that's why, for example, cars

work perfectly fine for a few years,

and you don't have take them into the garage.

And it's also why humans work pretty well for a few decades.

You don't have to take them into the hospital, either.

But eventually, the tolerable threshold of damage

is reached and exceeded, and that's

when things start to go downhill.

That's all that aging is.

And the reason I emphasize this is

because there is a very widespread misconception

in society that aging is some kind of mystery,

that it's some kind of enigmatic thing

that we absolutely don't understand and never can.

You know, it's somehow off-limits from medicine.

It's just not correct.

This is simply a really obvious and basic thing.

And we just need to get out of our heads

the idea that it's in any way mysterious.

We can actually describe it in just three words.

So I'm now obviously restricting myself to biology,

to living organisms.

Metabolism is the word that biologists

use to encompass all of the stuff

that the body does from one day to the next to keep us going,

keep us alive.

And metabolism creates damage, and damage accumulates

through our lives, even starting before we're born.

And eventually there's too much damage,

and you get the pathologies of old age.

Now, I've drawn these arrows in this rather curious way,

of course, to emphasize that what

we're trying to achieve with the work

that we're doing to eliminate aging

is to weaken the link between metabolism and pathology,

the link between being alive and being dead.

And there are various ways in which we might go about that.

But most of them are very misguided and essentially

a waste of time.

And I'm going to go through a little bit of why

that is before going on to what's going to work.

So what I'm showing you here is the answer that most

people would give to a very simple question, the question,

in what ways can one be sick, can people be sick?

In other words, give us a taxonomy of sickness.

Most people would say, well, OK, there's infectious diseases.

That's column one, communicable diseases.

Then there's column two.

There's congenital, genetic diseases

that some small proportion of us are unlucky enough to inherit.

Then in column three, there's the main problems

of ill health in the industrialized world today--

namely, of course, the chronic progressive

diseases of old age.

Alzheimer's, cancer, atherosclerosis--

those are the big diseases these days.

And then most people would say that way out

here in the stratosphere somewhere,

there is this other fourth completely different thing

which is not like diseases at all, this thing called

aging itself, which consists of these rather nebulous, rather

nonspecific phenomena, like frailty and sarcopenia, which

means the loss of muscle as we get older,

and immunosenescence, the declining function

of the immune system.

And most people will just feel that these things are

so different from diseases that we might as well not

even think about them in the same way at all.

You know, that they're kind of--

well, as I mentioned earlier, off-limits to medicine.

You know, they're kind of natural and inevitable

and all that kind of nonsense.