Ending Aging

The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is alive today. This preposterous-sounding statement is made by Aubrey deGrey of the Methuselah Foundation, whom I had the distinct pleasure of meeting earlier this month at the Yahoo! Brickhouse. deGrey is the author of the recent book Ending Aging - in it he outlines the seven deadly pieces that we need to solve in order to defeat aging and live indefinitely. He calls his approach Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, or SENS for short, and discusses the current state of biological research and directions for future discoveries.

Here are the Seven Deadly Things:
1. Cell loss, cell atrophy
2. Nuclear [epi]mutations (only cancer matters)
3. Mutant mitochondria
4. Death-resistant cells
5. Extracellular crosslinks
6. Extracellular junk
7. Intracellular junk

It seems to me that deGrey's biological approach combined with the flurry of imminent nanotechnological discoveries will undoubtedly lead to indefinite life extension. The question is how soon. This is such a fundamentally important question - the ultimate puzzle to solve - that I plan to devote my fifth career to it, after this new startup (details to come).

If not my parents' generation, then hopefully mine, or at least my children's, will be able to benefit from these new technologies and live to be 1,000. I'd personally love to live that long - there are so many amazing things to do and learn and think about in this world. I wonder if I'll still be blogging in 900 years...