Aubrey de Grey, a British aging researcher, has made the audacious claim that some humans today may live to be 1,000 years old.

He’s an individualist who’s not afraid to defy all of human history to make that claim.

De Grey sees aging as an “engineering problem” that can be solved by identifying the reasons why human tissue ages and targeting remedies for them, staving off death.

Although this bold claim has led to inevitable challenges, de Grey’s credentials demand that he be taken seriously. An AI engineer, de Grey is a self-taught gerontologist who has co-authored many respected journal articles with top scientists. He’s an adjunct professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a fellow at prestigious societies including the American Aging Association.

De Grey argues that science already has the knowledge to reverse aging, or “the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us.” He believes that only a lack of funding has kept humans from living for a millennium instead of a century.

His plan, called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), led to the creation of the nonprofit SENS Research Foundation to promote aging research.

De Grey’s bold statements led MIT to throw down the gauntlet and challenge him. In 2005, the MIT Technology Review offered a $20,000 prize to any molecular biologist who could prove that “SENS is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate."

No such debunker has stepped forward, and MIT judges concluded that while de Grey’s claims "don't compel the assent of many knowledgeable scientists" they are "not demonstrably wrong." In the end, the Review wrote a tribute to de Grey’s lofty aspirations: he’s “a man of ideas, and he has set himself toward the goal of transforming the basis of what it means to be human.”

©Prophets of AI