Aubrey de Grey wants to wish you a happy 200th birthday...

Death and Taxes, we’re told, are inevitable.

Aubrey de Grey, however, believes that aging is just another disease. Aging, almost all researchers would agree, is a side effect of human metabolism. As we get older the cells and larger structures of which we are composed, become less efficient, damaged or simply stop functioning altogether. When enough damage has accumulated the entire organism begins to suffer – we decline and eventually die.

de Grey argues that aging is wrongly viewed as an inevitability - beyond the ability or influence of medical science. SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) is de Grey’s plan to prevent the accumulation of damage caused by metabolism from reaching harmful levels. SENS calls for research in seven areas: cancer, mutations in mitochondria, a build-up of junk both inside and outside cells, loss of cells, cells which stop functioning normally and extracellular crosslinks.

Sounds complicated? We met Aubrey de Grey for a sip of beer in a London pub where he kindly chatted to us about SENS, the Methuselah Foundation and his latest book.

Aubrey de Grey: FirstScience Inteview

You are the Chairman and Chief Science Office of the Methuselah Foundation. What are the goals and activities of this organisation?

We were set up originally with the main activity of running a prize – called the MPrize – the Methuselah Mouse Prize – and this is something that we still think is very, very important because prizes have really good track record for stimulating technological progress. We have been very inspired by not just the XPrize - which has been a recent prize for space tourism - but also historically prizes such as those for being the first to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, which Lindbergh won, or the Longitude prize, long before, to develop a clock that worked well enough in conditions of rolling seas so that sailors could use the clock to calculate where they were.

Didn’t the fellow who invented that clock not get paid?

[Laughs] He got paid in the end! It took him a long time – but he got paid. The thing is, it really doesn’t matter whether or not he got paid, the fact is that the clocks got built.

The Mprize raises the profile of the longevity research area without trivialising it – and it encourages people to just ‘have a go. As well, it raises the profile of the surrounding human aging issues amongst the general public.

The financial award related to the MPrize seems to be a sliding scale of some sort – how does it work?

Yes. Instead of having some particular milestone that you have to reach, the way we do it with the MPrize is that you have to beat the previous record for the age of the longest lived mouse. The amount won is not the whole prize fund at the time – but rather a proportion based on the amount which you beat the previous record by.

Is there a standard mouse which is used in the MPrize?

Yes, you have to use a particular species Mus musculus – which is the species which is used in almost all laboratory mouse work across the whole of biology.

There are two prizes, actually. There is one called the Longevity Prize, which we’re probably going to discontinue as it’s not really directed towards what we’re aiming to do. Also because it’s not really all that popular and people aren’t donating much money to the prize fund. This prize is rather simple, it’s the one that states that you have to extend the lifespan of a mouse. Just a single mouse – only one need do – and you have to beat the previous record. It doesn’t matter how you do it. You can do genetic stuff, you can give it strange food, strange drugs or whatever.

The second prize, which is more aligned with our mission is called the Rejuvenation Prize. And it has to do with what is known as ‘later onset intervention. Interventions which are only begun during the second half of the mouse lifespan. Furthermore, in order to make it more scientifically legitimate, it’s focused on not just having one mouse, but a sufficiently large number of mice so that you can publish the results – with properly treated mice and controls and so on. And that’s the prize which has received most of the donations. We’ll have more initiatives this year to push this prize even more. It’s all going very nicely.

It’s important to us what sorts of initiatives that prizes of this kind are good for – and what they’re not good for. And there’s a very straightforward answer to that. Prizes are really good when you have no idea what’s going to work. When you basically have a rough plan and you want other people to come up with hunches on what might work to achieve your goals. Where prizes wouldn’t be really appropriate if you already know what is going to work and basically you have to co-ordinate everything and get all the right resources in. Let’s take the Apollo project as an example – or the Manhattan Project. They basically got all the right people together and all the materials to get the job done. A prize wouldn’t really be sensible for that.

So the Longevity Prize is basically a mechanism for the generation of ideas?

It’s more of a matter of filling in the detail. The overall structure is not in doubt. Where we are with life extension is somewhere between things like the Apollo Project and the unknown. We have a plan, SENS, and we think it’s going to work – but it might not. We feel that it’s really important for the Methuselah Foundation to have two approaches. One is to treat it a bit like the Apollo Project with specific goals and fund research which is not being funded in other ways, so that all of SENS gets investigated. But secondly, to get people to follow their hunches.

And in this manner, elements of the overall SENS plan could be modified from hunches or insights originating from those winning the Longevity Prize?

Yes, that’s right.