Bruno Giussani Interviews Aubrey de Grey
Bruno Giussani, the European Director of the TED Conference series, recently interviewed Aubrey de Grey on a range of topics, including the forthcoming Ending Aging book due out in September this year:
How has your research progressed since your TEDGLOBAL05 and TED06 speeches?The Methuselah Foundation has gone from strength to strength. The biggest development, among other donations, was the pledge of $3.5m from TEDster and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, which resulted from a dialogue that began at TED. Most of his pledge ($3m of it) is a 1:2 challenge, so out current goal is to obtain $6m from elsewhere to match that pledge in full.
OK, that's about the funding. But how's the research going?
It's been going really well too. We are currently sponsoring research by three teams (in Phoenix, Houston and Cambridge UK) on two of the most important SENS strands - LysoSENS, the identification and exploitation of microbial enzymes to break down molecules that we cannot naturally degrade, and MitoSENS, the incorporation of modified copies of the mitochondrial DNA into the chromosomal DNA so that mitochondrial mutations will have no effect. Both these projects are going really well, results coming out of the LysoSENS project have already been presented at two meetings and a paper has been submitted for publication in a prominent journal.
What should readers expect to learn from the book?
They will learn all about the detailed science of SENS. The book is written (largely by my splendid research assistant Michael Rae) very much for a non-scientist audience, but without dumbing down the science at all.
We here at the Foundation can attest to Ending Aging being a very fine book indeed.