Fountain of youth discovered: Immortality no longer a myth

'People have this crazy concept that ageing is natural and inevitable, and I have to keep explaining that it is not.'

If given the option, would YOU choose to live forever?

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Dr. Aubrey de Grey, the co-founder and chief science officer for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescense (SENS) Research Foundation, believes the ongoing research investigating the science of "repairing the effects of ageing" will allow humans to live to be 1,000-years-old -or possibly immortal.

Dr. de Grey, who graduated from Cambridge University in 1985, believes too few scientists are investigating the prevention of aging.

Speaking to The Actuary, Dr. de Grey stated: "You know, people have this crazy concept that ageing is natural and inevitable and I have to keep explaining that it is not.

"The human body is a machine with moving parts and like a car or an aeroplane, it accumulates damage throughout life as a consequence of normal operation."

Dr. DeGrey insists science and medicine will soon reach a point where humans can be repaired just like a vehicle or worn-out toy.

His theory has been met with much criticism, but Dr. de Grey refuses to back down.

"As time goes on, our progress becomes more significant in proving the feasibility of my ideas," he explained. "When I first started talking about these, people found them heretical and there was a lot of denigration from the scientific community, but I've gradually won them over.

"Other people are also making progress in actually implementing what we're doing. Just recently, an important US paper came out that showed you could extend the lifespan of mice using a particular type of damage repair that we'd been talking about for a decade."

In an interesting discovery, drugs such as Metformin, Rapamycin and Resveratrol create a reaction in mammals called "calorie-restriction mimetics."

Dr. de Grey explained the drugs "trick the body into thinking that it's in a famine situation when it isn't. Studies have shown that if you take a mouse or rat and you reduce its normal food intake by 30%, it lives about 30% longer than it would otherwise.

"This was discovered 80 years ago and has been a major topic of interest among gerontologists. Unfortunately, it doesn't scale. The longer-lived the species that you look at, the less the effects of famine in terms of longevity."

For example, when the experiment was conducted on monkeys, they only lived longer by a tiny fraction.

Though the drugs don't provide hope for humanity, Dr. de Grey believes the drugs can lead the FDA to consider aging a medical condition, which would lead to more funding and research to find a cure.

Should a cure be found, there are several troubling implications including overpopulation, boredom, famine and more.

In response to such concerns, Dr. de Grey simply responded: "We have to recognise that the problem we have today is enormous. Therefore it's critical not to be intimidated by the prospect that we have too many people, or living longer might be boring, and not let those considerations actually slow us down in terms of the development of medicines that get ageing under control."

Dr. de Grey believes twenty to twenty-five years from now, research will have allowed humanity a 50 percent chance of finding concrete evidence to support what he dubbed the "longevity escape velocity."

Though he admits unexpected complications can set that time frame back by 100 years, he believes the longevity escape velocity can save 100,000 lives worldwide.

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