One of the most important things, that I find I have to say again and again to every audience,
whether it's in interviews, or in lectures, or anything. I have to repeat it again and again and again because people seem not to want to hear it:
Is that I don't work on longevity. I work on health.
Headlines like "Immortality!" "Who Wants to Live Forever?" That's another one.
This is completely the wrong focus.
It's sort of there, but only sort of. What I'd really like to see is something like: "Forever Free of the Diseases of Old Age." Something like that.
My name is Dr. Aubrey de Grey, and I'm the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, which is a public charity, a research organization based in Northern California in Mountain View.
We work on the development of rejuvenation biotechnologies.
Which means: Medicines for the future, that will be able not merely to slow down the process of aging, but actually turn back the clock of aging.
So that people who are already in middle age or even older will become more youthful again, not just how they look, but also how they feel and how they function.
I grew up in London, in Chelsea, and I had a pretty normal upbringing really.
Well, not all that normal I guess, because I was brought up by my mother on her own. I didn't have any brothers or sisters either.
But, I went to school in a normal way. I went to University in Cambridge, and during that period I actually wasn't really interested in biology.
I gave up biology when I was fifteen. But I got into computer science.
And in particular, through my University time, I became very interested in artificial intelligence.
Because I felt very strongly that I wanted to do something with my life that would improve the quality of life of humanity.
I wanted to do something humanitarian that made a big difference.
And I realized that one of the biggest differences that could possibly be made would be to develop machines that would do all the tedious stuff for us.
You know, to gut our mines and serve hamburgers and such like.
And, of course people were trying to do this but progress was rather slow, and I thought I wanted to contribute to that mission.
And that's what I did for several years.
But during that time when I was a computer science researcher, I met and married a biologist.
"We have two big labs that add up to about 3,000 sq. feet, something like that."
Essentially what happened over the next couple of years was first of all, I accidentally learned a lot of biology over the dinner table.
But also, I began gradually, gradually to realize that we were never talking about aging.
The reason it was gradual was because ever since I was a young kid, I had just totally taken for granted that everyone agreed and understood that aging was the world's worst problem.
And, that, we needed to fix it really.
That we could in principle develop medicine that would actually bring it under control.
It was only gradually through talking to my wife and to other biologists, that I began to realize: No, that wasn't the case.
I realized that: "Hang on, I'm not working on the world's most important humanitarian problem after all. I'm only working on the second most important one."
After acknowledging - which took a long time to be honest - that it really was true,
that hardly any biologists were interested in aging, and even those who were were not really working on trying to do anything about it,
I decided I'd have to switch fields. So that's what I did.
In terms of longevity escape velocity, and the role of longevity as a motivator: A lot of people do have that as a motivator.
They think they have clear goals in life that would take thousands of years to achieve. Like going to distant stars, or whatever.
Or some people will think in terms of becoming post-human in some way or other.
I'm not any of that. I'm a practical guy. I'm a first-things-first sort of guy.
I work on health. I'm interested in stopping people from getting sick when they get older.
The fact is, being sick is bad for you, it's risky.
You're more likely to die in the next year if you're sick than if you're healthy.
So if we keep people healthy, they're less likely to die, so the average time they will live is longer.
We think we have a fighting chance of keeping people so healthy that their risk of death each year is the same -
however old they were, however long ago they were born - As it was when they were in their 20s.
And that's very low indeed.