 It's now my pleasure to introduce to you the person who will be our keynote speaker for this morning session of the conference, Dr. Aubrey DeGray, who's making his way up to the front and who I'm sure that you all recognize. Aubrey DeGray is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and Mountain View, California. And he is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, California-based nonprofit charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world's highest impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for the repair of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side effects of metabolism or damage that constitute mammalian aging, termed strategies for engineered negligible senescence, or SENSE, which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. Thank you so much for being here, Aubrey. Stage yours. Thank you very much, Lincoln, for a lovely introduction, and thank you all for coming. I'm delighted to be here. This is my first time at this conference. I have certainly learned quite a lot this morning. I didn't know there was such a thing as an atheist Mormon before. There are lots of things I didn't know, but I do think I have a much better understanding than I did when I arrived of why Mormonism and transhumanism have such a great intersection and why this particular organization is thriving so well. I'm delighted to be here. Now, I'm going to spend my time, pretty much, I'm going to spend maybe 15 minutes on describing basically science, but at a relatively high level, I'm not going to get too technical. In other words, I'm going to talk about what SENSE Research Foundation does and why and why we think it's going to work, and then I'm going to spend the rest of my time talking about, well, the title of my talk, really. Most of my remarks are going to be from a secular perspective, I guess, so I'm going to be talking really sort of ethics in general rather than from a particularly religious perspective. Towards the end, I think I'm going to say one or two things that will be explicitly with regard to Christianity in general and perhaps also Mormonism. Anyway, I'm going to start with, as I said, some science. What is aging? There are an awful lot of definitions of aging out there. I would like us all to be on the same page with regard to the definition that I'm going to use today, so I thought I would start with it. Aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place. It is the accumulation of various types of damage in the body, damage that eventually when it becomes too abundant causes the diseases and disabilities associated with old age. And this definition is, you know, it's a mechanistic definition, obviously, which is very important for this purpose. It also emphasizes that aging is a lifelong process. It doesn't start when you start going downhill. It starts before you're born. The accumulation of damage is a side effect of the normal operation of the human body and therefore it starts when the normal operation of the human body starts. So that's an important thing to start with. So first of all, I'm going to explain why I have chosen to work on this problem. The early, my early life wasn't as a biologist at all. I was a computer scientist and I worked in that area for humanitarian reasons. I was interested in developing artificial intelligence because I thought that it was a great shame that people have to, you know, spend their lives going down mines and serving hamburgers and all those tedious things when they could be instead, you know, doing what we're good at and what we're made for, enriching each other's lives. But when I discovered at the ripe old age of about 28, 29 that hardly any biologists were actually interested in aging, I decided that I had to switch fields really because this was an even more important problem. There's not much use having all these machines to do all the tedious stuff for us if we're already dead. So the key thing I want to explain here is that this is by far humanity's biggest problem, not just humanity's biggest medical problem. And here's a good way of describing why that is. If we accept that all aspects of age-related ill health are parts of aging, which we must accept because any specific disease of old age, let's say Alzheimer's disease, is a disease of old age only because it is an aspect of the later stages of something that goes on throughout life. Okay, if we accept that we have to include all the diseases of old age as parts of aging, then anything that kills older people is death from aging. And that means two-thirds of all deaths worldwide, roughly 100,000 people every day out of 150,000, 160,000 that die each day. And of course in the industrialized world hardly anyone dies of malaria and so it's much higher proportion, something like 90%. And it's extraordinarily expensive. Most of a typical person's medical expenses in their entire life is spent during the last year of their life. And that's whether they die at 60, or 70, or 80, or 110. And of course it's not just the direct expenses, it's also the indirect stuff, the fact that people are less productive when they have to spend time looking after their parents because their parents are sick, it's the fact that the elderly are no longer contributing wealth to society. And of course the different expertise that older people may have that is less prevalent among younger generations. So how are we going to fix this? Well, traditionally there have been two major schools of thought, major approaches to combating aging. I'm going to call them the gerontology approach and the geriatrics approach. And they can be very clearly distinguished and sharply distinguished using the definition of aging that I've already given you. This metabolism, the normal operation of the body, causes this lifelong accumulation of damage which is eventually pathogenic. What we can basically say is that geriatrics is about combating the pathologies of old age directly, beating on them just as if they were any other disease like measles for example. And that's really not a very good idea in fact it's not a very clever idea because the fact is you're never going to be able to eliminate from the body something which is the consequence of something that you're not attacking. It's obviously just too late in the game. If the damage is continuing to accumulate then any approach that attacks the consequences of that damage is going to become progressively less effective as the patient gets older. So this is essentially why the geriatrics approach which essentially accounts for everything we have today in the clinic against the disease of old age is essentially useless. It's not, it's better than nothing but it's very little better than nothing and it never will be much better than nothing. So of course I'm not the first person to point this out though I may be doing it in somewhat starker language than most people do and many people for many decades have realized that prevention is better than cure in this case and that we ought to dive in at an earlier stage of the chain of events and attack the process up here somewhere. And the gerontology approach consists essentially of saying well okay since this damage is a side effect of metabolism let us clean up metabolism. Let us try and slow down the rate at which the body creates these various types of damage in the first place and that would of course have the appropriate effect of postponing the age at which the damage becomes pathogenic. Unfortunately that's not too clever either because metabolism is rather complicated. This here is a simplified diagram for those of you who don't know of a small subset of what we know about how the body works and as you can see it's a bit hairy and it's completely idiotic to suppose that we might be able to actually tweak this thing manipulate it so that it does substantially less of something we don't want it to do namely the creation of damage without having undesired side effects undesired consequences that we didn't expect that do more harm than good. It's just not going to happen for the remotely foreseeable future. And of course this is an understatement of the problem the real problem is that this is a simplified diagram of a small subset of what we know about how metabolism works which is completely dwarfed as any biologist will tell you by the absolutely astronomical amount that we don't know about how the body works even ignoring all the stuff that we don't even know that we don't know. So you can forget this approach. But of course if that were the end of my story which is rather grim so far then I wouldn't be standing here. So what's the trick? Well, the trick is to look at what we already successfully do to extend the longevity, the functional longevity of simple man-made machines way beyond their warranty period way beyond the length of time that they were built to last. Because that's what we're trying to do here, right? We're trying to keep the body going in a good shape the longer than it was built to last. And the way we do it is by maintenance. We don't necessarily build VW Beatles to last more than 15 years or so. But some of them last 50 years. This one is more than 50 years old. Doing just as well as it was when it was built. And the reason is because it has been frequently and comprehensively maintained. And if we look at that from the point of view of the human body we are fundamentally talking about regenerative medicine. Repair at the molecular and cellular level of the structure of the body therefore thereby delivering repair and restoration of the function of the body. This has a fair bit going for it. First of all of course it's something that in principle can be applied late in life relatively late in life so that it can have benefits far greater than what I call the gerontology approach could have even if the gerontology approach were possible in the first place. That's good. And that's what we work on. Science Research Foundation as we're now called. We've just had this sort of slight rebranding. We are a charity, a US based, California based 501c3. And we're interested in developing and indeed of course working to promote and disseminate regenerative medicine solutions to aging. So this is what it's all about. The maintenance approach. And we can put it on this same diagram very easily. The maintenance approach says let's leave this process alone. This process whereby metabolism creates damage. And let's also leave this process alone the one where damage creates pathology. Instead let's dive in and separate, uncouple those two processes from each other by periodically repairing this damage not necessarily completely but fairly well so that the damage simply does not reach the pathogenic threshold. I can describe it also in relation to houses. You might not think of houses as machines but they'll do for this purpose because it's quite easy to show the analogy this way. A geriatrician is someone who addresses the problem of a hole in the roof by dealing with the consequences of the hole in the roof. The ceilings falling down and things like that. And of course this becomes increasingly ineffective. A gerontologist deals with the problem of potential holes in the roof by planting trees around the house so that it will be less likely that something will hit the roof. But of course this means that there's a potential side effect of the tree hitting the roof in a storm. So that's not so clever. And of course the engineer is doing the sensible thing waiting for damage to happen but actually repairing the damage before it has too many pathogenic consequences. And I think this is a pretty clear and concrete analogy, I think it's a valid one. So I'm not gonna tell you very much more about the science, all I'm gonna tell you is that this is not just a theoretical abstract idea. This is a very, very clear and detailed one. First of all, the reason why I was able to get excited about this back in 2000 or so when I had the essential eureka moment that I've told you so far is that I realized we could actually partition, subdivide the problem into a manageable number of sub-problems by looking at the types of damage that exist and enumerating them and enumerating how we might actually address them. The way I've been describing it for the past decade is like this, there are just seven types of damage and they're very concrete, down to earth things and you can see cell loss simply means cells dying and not being automatically replaced in the body by the division of other cells. So we have to replace them using medicine instead. I haven't got time to go down this entire list but there are two ways in which you can have too many cells rather than too few and there are two types of damage that matter in the side cells and there are two types of damage that matter in the spaces between cells. The first piece of good news is that it really does seem that this is a complete list. Everything on this list has been the subject of intensive gerontological interest and research for at least 30 years, which is quite nice. Furthermore, I have actually, as I just said, been challenging the community to extend this list. I've been describing it in these explicit terms for 10 years and nobody seems to have done so so that's pretty good news. But the best news, of course, is that we do have a very good idea how to actually go about addressing these things. So if we start at the top with cell loss, of course, you've all heard of stem cell therapy, that's exactly what stem cell therapy is. It's putting cells into the body which will divide and differentiate to replace cells that the body is not replacing on its own. And we can go down this list and talk in similarly concrete terms about all of these other things. The reason Sense Research Foundation exists is because most of these things are not being pursued anything like so aggressively and heavily with in terms of money as stem cell therapy is and therefore they're at an earlier stage of advancement and they need small organizations such as ourselves, we're only $4 million budget last year to actually push this forward. Much of the work that we do, both at our research center in Mountain View and extramurally in universities around the world, mostly in the US, is based on the more neglected areas on this list. And of course, I'd be very happy to talk more about the science here to anyone who's interested during lunch. I will only be here, I'm afraid, until about half past three, I have to go on a plane to Baltimore, but I will be delighted to chat with anyone who's interested. And this book I wrote a few years ago is also a good place to go. It's written for a general audience. I call it semi-technical because it's definitely heavy going. If you're not a biologist, you will have to read it slowly, but it does not rely on prior knowledge of jargon and expertise. It definitely is something that any educated layman ought to be able to get through with a bit of work. And the good news is that even though it was written five or six years ago now, it is still pretty up to date, by which I do not mean that nothing has happened. There have been plenty of progress. The good, what I mean is that the progress has been very much in line with what we predicted. The types of steps forward that have been made have been very much the ones that are already described in the book, or else we'd have written another one by now. So that's pretty good news. But as I said, for the rest of my time, I want to focus on the issues surrounding the desirability of this work. And indeed, I want to put the case to you that not only is the crusade against aging a thing that's compatible with scripture, but actually it's mandated by scripture, that it would be a sin not to do this. I'm gonna start just with psychology because it seems bleeding obvious, doesn't it? I mean, we're talking about preventative medicine for the diseases of old age, diseases that we're spending the most fabulous amount trying to treat at the moment very ineffectively. And that seems like a no-brainer. But unfortunately it doesn't seem to be like that in most people's minds. Most people have a lot of difficulty seeing that the diseases of old age really are just indistinguishable, indivisible from aging itself. They think there's this thing aging itself, which is somehow different and somehow natural and inappropriate to be addressed with medicine. It's complete bullshit. So I'm gonna talk about this a little bit. First of all, first of all, why do people think this way? My view is that they think this way because they have to. People basically need to put aging out of their mind because they know it's ghastly and they know it's inevitable, whereas they've got this weird idea in their minds that the diseases of old age are not inevitable. Of course, the only reason people can think that the diseases of old age are not inevitable is because you only get some of them before you die, but if you didn't get those ones, you'd get the other ones, right? And people just sort of kind of forget that. So they put this out of their minds because they know it's ghastly and they think it's inevitable. And that makes perfect sense. It's rational to do that for something that really is ghastly and inevitable, and get on with your miserably short life and make the best of it. But of course, the problem is that now, we are within striking distance of seriously doing something about aging medically. And that means that this whole attitude, this denial has become a vastly enormous part of the problem. I call it, this is where it generally comes down to. This is why it's so hard to break this down. People have decided that aging is immutable, and the main way that they have convinced themselves to put it out of their minds is by deciding that aging is actually good, or at least not bad. And these two things feed on each other in my experience. I talk to lay people about this issue, of course, all the time. People essentially will, in so many words, they will say, yes, I refuse to think very seriously about the question of whether aging is immutable, or whether it might be attacked by medicine, because, no, it wouldn't be a good idea anyway. Aging is a good thing. But then the same people, in the same breath, will also be thinking and sort of saying, well, I actually refuse to think seriously about the question of whether aging is desirable, because after all, it's academic. We can't do anything about it. So it's a bit ridiculous. And so much of my time is spent embarrassing people into pulling these things apart and addressing them individually. And I'm going to address the question of whether it's a good thing now. So these are some of the things I'm going to talk about, potential ethical issues of seeking to defeat aging. I'm going to go through six of them. Actually, I'm going to join two of them together, I think, but anyway, here we go. First of all, I'm going to talk about the question of whether it's actually wrong to seek immortality, whatever the hell that is, by technology. Now, here's the big problem. I'm not actually only proposing to extend the healthy human lifespan by 30 years. I think that these therapies that we're working on and that we want to work on, and that I feel we have a good chance, maybe 50-50 chance of developing within the next 25 years or so, will deliver about 30 additional years of healthy life. And furthermore, the good news is that they will deliver those years to people who are already in middle age or perhaps even older at the time that those therapies arrive. Because, of course, they are repair therapies, not just slowing down the accumulation of damage. So that's fantastic. But, as many of you may know, I have made a rather more extreme claim over the years based on the concept of longevity escape velocity, which essentially says that if we get those 30 years, or once we get those 30 years, therapies that can be applied to people who are, let's say, 60 and will rejuvenate them well enough that they won't be biologically 60 again until they're chronologically 90, then we've bought those 30 years to figure out what to do next. What to give to the 90-year-olds when they come back biologically 60 to rejuvenate them more thoroughly so that they won't be biologically 60 a third time until they're, let's say, chronologically 150. It turns out when you delve into the details of this and you think about how rapidly technology would need to develop, this medical technology, in order for this to happen, it turns out that it's completely... It's vanishingly unlikely that we would fail to maintain longevity escape velocity once we get to the point of getting those first 30 years. In fact, even 30 is probably an overconservative number. Even if we only got initially 15 years, I think we'd definitely be in the longevity escape velocity region. So that is good news, but what it means is quite a lot. It means that we are likely to live a lot longer. I'll come back to that in a second. If you think about the length of life that people live today and you look at the causes of death and you factor out the ones that are age-related, in other words, if you look at the risks of death that are not related to old age, and specifically, if you look in the industrialized world, then you essentially find that people... Well, less than 10% of people die of age-independent causes. And that means, broadly speaking, that if you eliminated aging, then people would live about 10 times longer. That's quite a lot longer, really. In fact, that's a rather conservative estimate for reasons that I may be able to come back to later. It's very likely that we would have at least four-digit lifespans once we got rid of aging, and so long as we maintained longevity escape velocity, we wouldn't actually have to completely get rid of aging at the beginning, but the effects would be equivalent to if we had. So, the question is, you know, is this a bad thing? Should we regard this as morally equivalent to actual immortality, as talked about in Scripture? And of course, the answer is, of course not. Until 200 years ago, we already didn't have death from aging to speak of. Hardly anyone died of aging because they didn't have time. You know, aging at death had what you might think of as a radioactivity-like distribution. People had a half-life. Of course, the word difference is it was very bad to be age zero. You were particularly vulnerable then, things like that, but it was, broadly speaking, an exponential distribution. Today, it ain't like that. Hardly anyone died until about 60. Almost everyone's died by 100, so it's a sort of convex survival curve distribution. So, what we're talking about is removing aging from the equation, and that essentially takes us back to the pre-medical era in terms of the distribution of aging at death. It goes back to being essentially a radioactive distribution. It's just it's more stretched out than before. So, the idea that this is, in some sense, morally wrong seems to be pretty damn crazy. It's bizarre. You know, this is how we were originally. I'm gonna move on now to this idea, the idea that we might end up with extended ill health. So, in other words, it would cause more suffering. And I wanna stop there for a second because I do want to emphasize, especially to an audience like this, that I don't work on longevity. Longevity of the thought that I'm talking about here, dramatic though it may be, will be a side effect of staying healthy. It's all about keeping healthy. So, I mean, you know, this is actually what biologists take. Colin Blackmore is a guy that I did a debate with about a year ago in England. And he's a very influential man. He used to run the Medical Research Council. That's the UK equivalent of the NIH, which means he is far more influential than anyone who studies the biology of aging. And he actually said this. This is not even like off the cuff remarks. This is actually part of his prepared speech. He says that the mission of climate defeat aging is unrealistic and he's a distraction from the task of preventing and curing disease. Now, I've just explained to you that in fact it's the only way to cure. So, and he actually thinks this. He actually thinks this. He's completely blind to the fact that age-related diseases are part of aging. Secondly, he says, if this miracle should somehow happen, the consequences would be a disaster for humanity and for the planet. In other words, he totally hasn't thought about the fact that aging is actually quite bad for you. It causes quite a lot of suffering. Yeah. So, I mean, we can make these dramatic statements. If you get into the details of what this means, then the chances are that once we get those initial 30 years so that we have people living to up to 150, of course, the world record longevity at the moment is around 120, then we will be almost there. We will have done the hard part. People only slightly younger will probably live to four digits. We can say this, but in the short term, we've got rather more important things to worry about. You know, the fact that people won't get these diseases that we're not terribly fond of. And I think that's quite important to remember. So, it's all about this. It's all about remembering that the longevity benefit is a side benefit. And we're talking about restoring people and maintaining them in a state where they don't just look but they also feel and function just like young adults, however long ago they were born. That's what this is all about. So, it's absolutely ridiculous to oppose this work on the basis that it might somehow extend age-related ill health and thereby, you know, increase suffering or anything like that. All right, so here's the one that makes my blood boil the most, actually. And I'm gonna talk about this a little bit because it's something that gerontologists who study the sociology of ageing actually think in large numbers. Most social gerontologists would subscribe to what you're saying on this slide. You don't have to read it because I'll just pick out the important part. The key thing here is that there is some kind of, it seems almost deliberate confusion, conflation between aging on the one hand and old age on the other hand. See this, several professional groups present themselves as a waging war on old age. He actually wrote this. This is John Vinson, a very distinguished British social gerontologist. And quite a nice guy, actually, if you talk to him about anything else. And he goes on about the symbolic practices of these groups and it reels that they share a dominant cultural view, you know, that's what the sort of language that sociologists like to use. And they talk about the extended, they say, some of these guys, the contradiction in their aim of understanding these diseases by getting the goal of an extended healthy lifespan, which avoids having to confront the moral dilemmas of extending the lifespan for its own sake. In other words, they're making this complete straw man, this completely false accusation that we're in this for longevity's sake. And trying to sort of hide behind something that is actually worth doing. So it's a bit of a frustration that, but it happens a lot. And when you come across this in the wider world when you leave this room, you know, don't tolerate it. Okay, I'm gonna spend a little more time on these two, which I'm gonna deal with jointly because they really are two sides of the same coin. The issue here is, you know, relative priorities. There are an awful lot of good causes out there, things that we ought to spend our time and our money on. The question is, which should we spend our time and money on? A lot of people will say, well, you know, when we've cured malaria in sub-Saharan Africa and, you know, generally help the disadvantaged sufficiently, then let's worry about dealing with the health and welfare of people who are already doing pretty well. I say that bullshit because basically, first of all, there are a lot more people suffering because of old age than there are people even suffering from malaria and such like. And secondly, because the main reason for thinking this way is actually this down here, that people inherently aren't really convinced that this is even slightly possible and therefore they don't really wanna prioritize it. I think it's really important also to think about what we think, what we might call the discount rate because when something is at an early stage in research, it, of course by definition, it's gonna be a while before it actually benefits humanity and therefore one might say, well, okay, it's more important to do good now. And one could interpret that as simply you don't know whether the research is going to succeed but one could go further, one could just say, well, people who are alive today matter more than people who will be alive in the future or will be in need of help in the future. I think that's dubious, personally. I think that's basically not true. Apart from anything else, we've got to consider the possibility of positive feedback. If we actually do even a little bit of good early on, we may be able to spur more effort to do more thereafter because people will think it's more realistic. This is the real discount rate thing, though. Uncertainty, intervening events may make the effort pay off less than expected. That may be because the research will fail or it may be that the research will be found to be the wrong research and something else will come along that works better but none of this really adds up. You've got to work with the information you have, I think, and try and make the most of it for the benefit of humankind. Givwell is an interesting agency that does evaluations of charities and this is from an email that I had from the guy who runs Givwell, Holden Konofsky. He's very convinced that this is a good idea. He definitely thinks that, and he talks about life extensively, he doesn't even talk about health the way I do. He thinks that this is a good thing and he's using very diplomatic language here, basically saying I'm not interested in this but saying he thinks it will take us a while to come to the side whether he should be interested. It's whether it represents the best use of funding when factoring in existing efforts and tractability. In other words, he hasn't read my stuff, he doesn't know whether it's actually gonna work and he doesn't really believe it anyway. Well, you're the great shame but you've got to start somewhere and actually educate these people. This is something that another person working in this same movement, which is now called the effective altruism movement, generally evaluating whether particular causes are better uses of dollars than others. He says things like this, my house probably won't burn down this year but I still buy house insurance. This is an important point to remember. Even if you think that there is a low probability of research to postpone or indeed eliminate the diseases of old age, it will succeed. If you think that probably won't succeed, let's say you even think it's only got a 1% chance of succeeding. So you divide the potential impact by 100, then it's so bigger than anything else, really. So you can't really use that as an argument for not prioritizing it. This is an interesting statement by a very prominent ethicist, Peter Singer, at Princeton, and he basically said the same thing. This is from the end of an essay he wrote just a couple of months ago that was very widely published, actually. I was very happy about this. As he says, even if there's only a small chance that I'm right, the huge payoff make it a better bet than areas of medical research that are currently far better funded. That's the key thing that I think if that idea can get out there, then we've got a much better chance of getting this work funded better. It's a term, I think basically Karnowski's position is something that it's very seductive to think that way. To think that you'd like to be able to evaluate these probabilities accurately and come to a conclusion, but we can't. We just know that we can't actually do so. So high risk high gain is all very well. Even if you agree with that, if you know that your uncertainty of the risk, evaluating the risk is enormous, then maybe just do stuff where you can evaluate things more accurately. I think we should resist that temptation. I think we have to determine the expected value of a particular effort. On the basis of the information we have, even if we know that that information is woefully inadequate. So finally, I'm gonna talk about other unknown things going wrong. There was a question after one of the earlier talks concerning the possible consequences in particular to do with overpopulation of seriously combating aging and essentially decimating the death rate. And of course, this is a question that has been asked once or twice before over the years. And I have a, and unlike the speaker who said he didn't have a good answer, I do have a good answer, so. But before I give the answer, I want to point out how insidiously pervasive this sort of thinking is. And it's not just about overpopulation. It's about general dystopic consequences of the defeat of aging. This is a blurb from a book that I can't remember what the book's called and that's good because I don't want to tell you. This is the sort of thing that you have to put up with in fiction. And of course, it happens in film all the time. Imagine a near future where a cure for aging is discovered and made available to people worldwide after a much political debate. Immortality sees the eye word. You can always tell when someone's going to disparage this work if they use the word immortality to describe it. However, it comes with its own unique problems, including evil green people. Government euthanasia programs, you know, I mean, you've seen probably Blade Runner and In Time, you know, you get the idea. A disturbing new religious cult. I couldn't, yeah, you know all about that. Oh, God, I've got the name of the book right there. I'm sorry about that. It's an unforgettable thriller. Well, I'll forget it right now. So this is what happened. But here's the point. If you actually put the faintest thought into the actual topic that we're talking about, you can immediately reject this sort of argument. It always comes down to the uncritical adoption of some particular assumption about what the future's going to be like, which, when examined even a tiny little bit, can be seen to be absurd. So let's just, first of all, talk about overpopulation. Now, one rather important thing about the elimination of aging, or indeed the elimination of death, is that people will still only get older at one year per year. Right, we're not gonna have any thousand-year-old people for another 900 years, whatever happens. Now, an awful lot happens in 900 years. In particular, an awful lot of technology happens in 900 years. And that's rather important to bear in mind here. We are not going to be surprised by this problem. This problem is going to happen progressively. And we're going to have the opportunity to use technological and other means, mainly technological though, to address it. However, let's, first of all, look at what the problem is. How many kids are people gonna want anyway? You know, fertility rates, I'm sure you all know, have been going down worldwide. The United Nations predicts that, as things stand, without the elimination of aging, global population will actually peak and start to decline around the middle of this century. You know, sure, that would probably be delayed if we didn't have death from aging anymore. But the reason it's happening is because people are getting less keen on having kids as any society gets to the point of a certain level of female prosperity and emancipation and education. They just seem to want to do other things with their lives for a lot longer than they used to. They, so it's not just about how many they have, it's also, I just alluded to, the age at which they have them. At the moment, we see universally that when a population goes through this transition of having fewer kids, they also have a rise in the average age at which women have their kids. Of course, women sometimes want to have their kids younger, but we're talking about averages here, because we're talking about population. One thing that has to be borne in mind, therefore, is that an aspect of aging that will be eliminated along with all the others is menopause, which means that the increase in the average age of childbirth is very likely to accelerate by, as women who are choosing to have their kids later can choose to have them a decade later still and a decade later still. And that, of course, has an enormous impact, I'm sure you can easily see, on the trajectory of global population. The big one is this one, though. The carrying capacity of the planet is not a fixed quantity. It's determined by technology. As we develop, whether it's nuclear fusion or more renewable energy or whatever, the carbon footprint comes down and it becomes possible to have more people on the planet with less environmental impact. And therefore, the overpopulation problem, such as it might be, is powerfully alleviated. So none of these things come into the thinking that 99.9% of people actually engage in when they address these things. And we're actually funding a project now with a very distinguished group at the University of Denver to look at this properly, to develop really rigorous systems for forecasting through to 2100, what's actually gonna happen. People also say, well, I wouldn't wanna work for 900 years and I wouldn't wanna retire when I'm 65, same as I always thought I was gonna be able to and all that sort of thing. Well, hello. My previous field, artificial intelligence, is an important player here. We know that at the moment there's been an enormous shift over the past century or so from manual labor jobs, manufacturing and agriculture and so on, into the service sector. And the reason there has been this shift is because we enabled it by automation that meant that we don't need so many people working in the manual sector. Now, of course, we're seeing already a great deal of automation of the service sector and that's going to continue. And what's gonna happen next? What is the left after that? The entertainment, basically. There's only so many people you can have entertaining, right? So we're going to have to bite this bullet and abandon the entire concept that the economy revolves around everyone who wants to being able to work 40 hours a week on things they don't actually want to do. All right, so the whole idea of thinking about pensions in the way that we think about them now or thinking about the working life in the way we think about it now is already completely crazy, irrespective of anything that we might do with the elimination of aging. I'm gonna come finally in my last two minutes to question that is explicitly religious. And I think it's an important one. I read a paper about this a few years ago. This is essentially an attitude that I come across quite often when I speak to religious people about this topic. They have a sort of lack of urgency about the whole thing because, you know, well, yeah, it's gonna be grim being sick when I'm old, but I won't be sick for long and then I'll have an indefinite time when I'm in heaven and all that, and that's wonderful. But the thing is, you know, if we examine scripture here, and I think this applies pretty much universally across religions, then it doesn't do anything to work. It doesn't seem to fly. I mean, we know that scriptures tend to say that murder is probably a bad thing. Okay, it didn't do it. And we know that they tend to say that suicide's a bad thing. You shouldn't do that either, right? Now, they also say that there's no distinction. There are moral equivalents between action and inaction. So let's just take, for the sake of argument, the parable of the Good Samaritan. It was the people who didn't act who were sinning, right? So, you know, in other words, if we tolerate our own aging, we are essentially sinning by inaction. We are hastening our own death by inaction when we could act to stay down here for as long as God wants us to, and, you know, do more good down here until God calls time on us. And of course, this is in no way playing God and disrupting God's plan the way some people carelessly say, because, you know, as I heard, God was supposed to be omnipotent, and therefore he can strike you down with a thunderbolt however healthy you are, right? You know, but above all, aging is bad for you. It causes an amazing amount of suffering, and therefore, you know, defending aging or even, like, being ambivalent about it and not pursuing some contribution to the crusade against aging is ultimately rejecting a chance to alleviate suffering. And that seems to me to be absolutely clear and present evidence that it's a sin not to strive to fix aging. So I'll just stop there and point out that most people in this room would probably prefer to be the person on the left, even if he is about to have his head bitten off by a shark, and that it's up to you to help. I can't do this on my own. I'm a biologist, I'm doing the research, I'm orchestrating the research, but ultimately the research takes money. Money only happens with public support. Public support only happens with advocacy, and everybody can do advocacy. If you like what I've said, then don't just keep it to yourself. Go out and say it to your friends, to your colleagues, to your family. Make sure that this is increasingly adopted as a way of thinking that actually makes sense, and then this research will bear fruit sooner than it otherwise would. Thank you very much. So it's time for a few questions, guys, marvelous. Good. He actually was the last one, by the way, he wasn't just... Yeah, great, very, very, very poignant, and exactly why I think I want to run for office. So I got a two-part question. One is how much of your funding currently is coming from government sources? I can answer that one quickly. None, none, yeah. We are actually in the process of trying to change that, but we're not holding our breath. At the moment, virtually all of our funding comes from philanthropy. And two, what came up to me was once we achieve this and we have more time, you know, we see often in tribal society and then in just people who are spoiled with the time, they get into a lot of trouble. And, you know, they start wars when they're not harvesting. Where is... Have you put any thought as how we will prevent that? Okay, yeah, this is an excellent point, and I think one can definitely argue it both ways. My sense is that the strongest influence on people's inclination to violence and so on as a result of all this will be the opposite of what you describe, simply because violence involves risk to life. And the more you value your life, the less willing you are to put it at risk. So, you know, arguably this would mean that people would actually withdraw from violence as the quantity of life ahead of them is increased and therefore the value of life as they perceive it is increased. I think the evidence for that is quite strong in what we've seen in recent history. For example, country after country abandoning the death penalty and abandoning conscription into the army, for that matter, abandoning armed conflict, pretty much. Now, the last time there was an actual armed conflict, a proper war between wealthy countries was World War II. And that is actually the longest interval of time since the dawn of history. That's been true. So this is pretty good news. And I think we can see certainly in more prosperous neighborhoods as less violence, you know, how come? It must be because the people don't want to do it, really. So, yeah, I mean, I think your point about tribal societies is however an important one. It definitely bears more research. Yeah, that's right. Hardly anyone died of aging because they died of other stuff first. I have in the phone this idea, but I do know that whether it's true or not, the way to go about reshoring us to that, the state that is described there or better is one that involves simply biomedical research. And so it doesn't really change anything. Aubrey, thank you. First a statement and a question. I want to tie everything you've said to a very deep-rooted Mormon thought. And that is the Mormon ideology is to create a heaven on earth. One of the reasons it's sought like exists out in this 1850s desert is to begin that utopian city. And I'm just carrying that idea forward to create the utopia that you've described. Of course, we do it in terms of brotherhood, fellowship, liberty, and poverty. I think you're right. I just like to say, I think you're right about that. And I don't think it's only the Mormon faith that feels this way. One thing that I ought to mention that's relevant here is that the precursor of Saint's Foundation, the Methuselah Foundation, which was the first organization that I started back in 2002, the co-founder with me of that, David Goebel, is the Jehovah's Witness. And they, of course, have somewhat similar beliefs in that regard. Now my question, and it has a little hint of humor to it. Since people will live longer in your objective here. Probably, depending on whether God throws a thunderbolt at them. Do you see as the ideal that we all age pretty much the way we do now when we plateau at age 25, or that the life expectancy of 60 to 80 now simply gets elongated. Therefore, the terrible twos that we now have get stretched out for 20 years. The teenage years of 13 to 19 hit about age 50, et cetera. How do you see that ideal? Yeah, okay, no, it's a perfectly valid question. And the answer is very simple. Yes, we will basically not have any change in the development period in reaching adulthood. And then after that, people will say pretty much at the age they choose to say. So, because aging will not be eliminated, but rather it will be repaired periodically, this means that your biological age essentially is oscillating between treatments. And exactly how old you biologically are simply depends on how thoroughly and how frequently you have the treatment. Hi, Aubrey. There was a survey that I heard reported on a few months ago, where only one to 2% of the population expressed any interest in living hundreds of years. And I'm wondering if there is a role that you see for the arts to play in keeping people's imaginations and in aliving their imaginations to get more interest in that, which would convert, of course, into more donations to foundations. Sure, yeah, there's a kind of, yes, I believe in a kind of pincer movement here. On the one hand, as you've heard, I've spent a lot of my efforts ensuring that people focus on the health aspect rather than the longevity aspect. But secondly, I agree that if we could simply get people more comfortable with the longevity aspect, then that would sort of be a pincer movement. And this is important to do because try as I may, I cannot stop journalists writing articles about me with the word immortality in the title. The fact is, journalists do like to sell papers and they do like to sensationalize this work. So sure, I'm emphatically not an artist, so I do not know whether art, or indeed humanities in general, is really in a position to achieve what you describe. I certainly wish it were. My sense is somewhat pessimistic. I think it's no accident that films and books about a post-aging world tend to emphasize arbitrary, dystopic storylines because it reinforces the pro-aging trance that we speak and thereby makes people go away comforted and their views that aging is a good thing and that we shouldn't fix it are entrenched. And I think that happens simply because it's health. So it's all very well to create art or indeed books or films that tell the opposite story, but you've got to get an audience for them and I don't know how to do that. Hi, I have a comment. I think aging should be part of effective altruism, of course, and that effective altruism is maybe the most important matter idea in the world and that includes considering things that seem strange to other people like aging. And I noticed that you yourself, Mr. DeGray, posted a module, I think, on ThinkTheHighImpactNetwork.org so you seem to know quite a bit about it. I know quite a few of the people in that movement, yes. That's okay, great. That's really cool. In fact, there are about 20 or so meetups and I'd like to start one in Salt Lake City and I thought the people in this room might be more likely to be interested. So watch out for that. My name's Adam Eithem, by the way. Excellent, I congratulate you, Adam. That's a very valuable thing to do. I think that this movement is still much too small and could definitely benefit. We have a question from our online participants and you mentioned sort of the headlines that you typically see in the media. What would be some of your preferred headlines for advocacy? Preventative medicine for aging is possible. Too many syllables, aren't it? Yep, yep. First I wanted to, of course, thank you for answering my question. I couldn't answer. But the other question is thoughts in terms of the more immediate period of this because obviously you addressed somewhat the question about work in general. But when you look at this research and perhaps what the SENS Foundation itself is doing and the question of patents and economics of this and how it spreads beyond some incredibly long-lived rich people, what is, I guess if you will, the framework that the SENS Foundation has and yourself in terms of how this work should be done in the immediate term and then in the long term. Yeah, yeah, the hard part. Yeah, so the answer to your question is easy. The hard part is getting the answer acknowledged and accepted by the people who need to. So the answer is aging is so extraordinarily expensive that any therapies that we had that really did constitute comprehensive and effective preventative geriatrics would pay for themselves in no time at all. It would become completely economically suicidal for any nation not to make these therapies free at the point of delivery for anyone who would old enough to need them irrespective of ability to pay. In other words, it would pay for through taxation. I know that in the US or other, insanely tax-averse societies, unlike my own, this concept sounds a bit foreign, but the fact is, it's like basic education. Basic education in this country is free too, right? And that's because you all know that if you didn't actually educate your kids then 20 years down the road, you'd be screwed. So, I mean, the education should be better, of course, than it is, but still. It's that sort of logic. This economic arithmetic does not apply to high-tech medicines of today. And that's why we see, indeed, their availability being restricted by ability to pay. So, people just have to understand that. And when I say people, I mean government, obviously, you have to make the policies to make this work. I mean the public, you have to vote the government in. And I also mean, of course, as you were alluding to the private sector, the whole medical industry has to understand this. There's a bit of a counter-intuitive thing here because, of course, at the moment, the medical industry makes its money out of sick people. And the overwhelming majority of sick people are sick because of aging. So, one might superficially think that what we're doing here is essentially destroying the medical industry, and they probably wouldn't like that. But, of course, that's not really true because the medical industry is perfectly capable of developing and delivering products that constitute preventative geriatrics if the money's there. So, all we really need to do is get society to be on board for preventative medicine for the disease of the old age, and then the industry will follow the money.