UD Socratic Club to present talk by de Grey on regenerative medicine, aging

11:08 a.m., Sept. 26, 2012--The Socratic Club at the University of Delaware will present a talk by Aubrey de Grey titled “Regenerative Medicine: A Realistic Prospect for Defeating Aging Altogether” at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 2, in 204 Kirkbride Hall.

An English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology, de Grey is the chief science officer of the SENS Foundation. He is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research, author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007). 

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June 6-9: Food and culture series

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• June 6-9: Food and culture series
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• July 22: WWE Heatwave Tour
• Through Sept. 16: Women of color in academia

He is perhaps best known for his view that human beings could, in theory, live to lifespans far in excess of that which any authenticated cases have lived to today. 

De Grey's research focuses on whether regenerative medicine can thwart the aging process. He works on the development of what he calls "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence," or SENS, a tissue-repair strategy intended to rejuvenate the human body and allow an indefinite lifespan. To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes. SENS is a proposed panel of therapies designed to repair this damage. 

De Grey is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, the American Aging Association, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and an advisor to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

He has been interviewed in recent years in a number of news sources, including CBS 60 Minutes, the BBC, The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, the Washington Post, TED, Popular Science, The Colbert Report, Time and the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. 

In 1999, he published The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, in which he writes that obviating damage to mitochondrial DNA might by itself extend lifespan significantly, though he said it was more likely that cumulative damage to mitochondria is a significant cause of senescence, but not the single dominant cause. On the basis of the book, the University of Cambridge awarded de Grey a doctorate in 2000.

The event is cosponsored by UD’s Center for Science, Ethics and Public Policy.