Member Spotlight

Q&A with Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, PhD from Cambridge, UK and Sunnyvale, CA.

Q: How long have you been a member of GSA?
A: I became a member in 1997. At that point, I had just published my first paper in the field and I strongly recognised that attendance at the most important conferences was essential if I were to get really up to speed on the latest developments in such a wide-ranging discipline.  The GSA was clearly the place to be. Nowadays the GSA remains a key annual meeting, along with the American Aging Association and the sesquiannual Gordon Conference.

Q: How did you get interested in the field of aging?
A: For my whole life I had considered it obvious that aging is (a) a bad thing and (b) potentially amenable to medical intervention. I didn't get involved in it myself, purely because I presumed that biologists the world over thought the same and were doing their best to develop such interventions. Only after I met my wife, a geneticist who was at that time a professor at UCSD, did I come to appreciate that very few biologists viewed aging as interesting or important, and most of those who did were not sanguine about effective intervention. Accordingly I decided to switch fields from my earlier interest in artificial intelligence.

Q: What are your key responsibilities at your job?
A: I'm the chief science officer and the chief spokesperson for SENS Foundation, a California-registered charity focused on the development of regenerative medicine solutions to aspects of age-related ill- health. In the former capacity I determine research priorities, evaluate progress in the research we're funding, and supervise a couple of outstanding assistants who help me to keep up with the ongoing literature and other progress. In the latter capacity I give roughly 50 invited talks and 100 media interviews each year, disseminating what we do and why to all kinds of audiences.

Q: What is your most memorable research experience?
A: I think my most memorable experience has to be the "eureka moment" in 2000 when I realised that reversing aging, i.e. repairing the lifelong- accumulating molecular and cellular damage that eventually contributes to age-related pathologies, was probably going to be far easier than the traditional approach of slowing down the creation of that damage. That was the insight that led to the creation of the SENS research program and that has dominated my work ever since.

Q: How do you feel GSA serves the field of gerontology and aging research?
A: The main role that the GSA serves is one that, to be honest, I think it still needs to do much more to achieve. Namely: uniquely among US organisations, and by far the most prominently among organisations worldwide, it has the capacity to foster cross-fertilisation between communities who study aging in different ways and for different reasons. The bringing together of four communities in the same hotel, or more generally in the same society, is a huge opportunity to resolve the profound deficiencies of comprehension that exist between biogerontolgoists and geriatricians, for example, or between sociologists and biologists. I personally feel that the only way to achieve this is to take action at a higher policy level than simply within academia, so as to alter the funding and career priorities that determine scientists’ self-interests. The GSA has the clout to do this, but it is a long-term and daunting challenge.

Q: Do you have any tips for emerging gerontologists?
A: My single biggest item of advice would have to be this: work hard to understand the goals and perspectives of all constituencies within the field. The mutual incomprehension that currently exists between those with different interests can be overcome, but only by conscious, serious effort. And the more it is overcome, the closer gerontology will come to achieving its rightful status within the scientific world, which is nothing less than the study of the world's most serious problem.

Q: Tell us a little about your most recent activities/accomplishments?
A: I've been focused for the past few years on improving the understanding of both the scientific community and the outside world of the potential for regenerative medicine to impact aging. Arguably the single most important recent development has been the bringing together of several of the very most prestigious biogerontologists in the world to co-author a hard-hitting declaration of the imperative to give more credence and effort to the quest for ways to postpone age- related ill-health of those who are already in middle age - the baby boom generation. This declaration appeared recently in Science Translational Medicine (Rae MJ et al: The Demographic and Biomedical Case for Late-Life Interventions in Aging).

Q: Have you had an important mentor in your career? If so, how did it make a difference?
A: Other than my wife, who accidentally taught me a lot of biology over the dinner table in the early 1990s when I was a computer scientist, I would say that I've had no colleagues who really rise to the level of mentor. However, I have certainly identified colleagues over the years whom I greatly look up to: Denham Harman and Michael West are probably the two most important.