Do you want to live forever?


Controversial theorist Aubrey de Grey insists that we are within reach of an engineered cure for aging. Are you prepared to live forever? His recipe, known as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), calls for a number of ingredients which do not yet exist.
The SENS theory describes “seven deadly things” that erode the body’s youthfulness at the cellular level, eventually leading to death by old age. Aubrey de Grey means to apply exercise, gene therapy, stem cells, and other yet-to-be-discovered methods of medicine to counteract each of these age-advancing devices:
  1. Cell death and atrophy: Treatable with exercise, stem cells, and chemicals which stimulate cell division.
  2. Cancerous cells: Theoretically treatable with a type of gene therapy being developed, called Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres (WILT).
  3. Mutant mitochondria: Mutated DNA in the mitochondria causes a number of diseases. These can be prevented by moving the mitochondrial DNA into the cell nucleus, where the rest of the DNA resides.
  4. Cell senescence (unwanted cells): Fat cells and other unwanted cruft can be removed surgically, or by stimulating the immune system to attack unwanted cells.
  5. Extracellular crosslinks (loss of elasticity): Certain proteins, such as those in cells making up the arteries, become too rigid over time because they bond to each other. These bonds can be broken with certain chemicals (some in clinical trials even today).
  6. Extracellular junk: “Plaque” which collects between cells can be eliminated by stimulating the immune system, and/or by using peptides called “beta-breakers.”
  7. Intracellular junk: Molecular garbage can be prevented from overwhelming certain cells by introducing enzymes which are known to be effective against such molecules.
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