The Invincible Man

The further he got into Carpenter's world and that of her senior colleagues, the more incensed he became that biologists and gerontologists just accept this carnage.

"I was appalled. Utterly appalled. I began to realize the profound difference of motivation and mind-set between scientists on the one hand and technologists and engineers on the other hand."

In his world of information technology, the norm is making the world new. Try something and if it doesn't work, try something else. Science doesn't pave the way for engineering, it's the other way around. Intel figures out a way to make wires only a few molecules thick. Why the circuits function is at best of passing interest -- as long as they do. Science can take years if not decades to catch up with an adequate explanation of the device's quantum mechanics. It is the final triumph of Edison over Einstein.

The idea of bringing pragmatism to biology made de Grey think "I might be able to make a contribution. I became very aware by this time that biology was critically short of synthesizers -- people who brought ideas together from disparate fields who came up with new ideas for experimentalists to do." So he got his PhD in biology from Cambridge and started scattering ideas like viruses.

Aging consists of seven critical kinds of damage, according to de Grey. For example, unwholesome goo accumulates in our cells. Our bodies have not evolved means quickly to clean up "intracellular aggregates such as lipofuscin." However, outside our bodies, microorganisms have eagerly and rapidly evolved to turn this toxic waste into compost. (De Grey made this connection because he knew two things: Lipofuscin is fluorescent and graveyards don't glow in the dark.)

By taking soil samples from an ancient mass grave, de Grey's colleagues in short order found the bacteria that digest lipofuscin as easily as enzymes in our stomachs digest a steak. The trick now is getting those lipofuscin-digesting enzymes into our bodies. That has not yet been done. But, de Grey says, comparable fundamental biotechnology is already in clinical use fighting diseases such as Tay-Sachs. So he sees it as merely an engineering problem.

Examples like this make up the 262 pages at the center of "Ending Aging."

"It's a repair and maintenance approach to extending the functional life span of a human body," de Grey says. "It's just like maintaining the functional life span of a classic car, or a house. We know -- because people do it -- that there is no limit to how long you can do that. Once you have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of interventions to get rid of damage and maintain these things, then, they can last indefinitely. The only reason we don't see that in the human body now is that the panel of interventions we have available to us today is not sufficiently comprehensive."

By 2005, his ideas had attracted enough attention as to no longer be merely controversial. De Grey was being pilloried as a full-blown heretic.

"The idea that a research programme organized around the SENS agenda will not only retard ageing, but also reverse it -- creating young people from old ones and do so within our lifetime, is so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community," wrote 28 biogerontologists in the journal of the European Molecular Biology Organization. Their recommendation: more of the patient, basic scientific research that is their stock in trade.

"Each idea that we decide to pursue will cost years of work and a great deal of money, so we spend a lot of time -- at meetings, seminars and in the library -- trying to search for and weigh alternatives, and looking for loopholes in our chain of arguments before they are pointed out to us either by peer reviewers or experimental results.

"Presented by an articulate, witty and colourful proponent, a flashy research agenda might catch the eye of a journalist or meeting organizer who is hunting for attention, publicity and an audience; however, the SENS agenda is easily recognized as a pretence by those with scientific experience.