Aubrey de Grey wants aging to become “the new COVID.” He means the response, not the disease: the kind of worldwide alarm, funding and political attention that a pandemic brought. In a recent interview with Longevity.Technology ahead of RAADfest 2025, he said it would take one result to set that off. Big progress in mice.
De Grey is president and chief science officer of the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation, which he founded in 2022. He also co-founded the SENS Research Foundation and wrote Ending Aging, the book that gave the field its damage-repair paradigm.
Aging as damage that can be fixed
His central claim is simple to state. Aging is the lifelong buildup of molecular and cellular damage, and damage can be repaired. He says he first put that idea forward roughly 20 years ago, and he now describes it as mainstream thinking.
Drugs alone will not do it, in his view. Small molecules can only slow the creation of new damage. “There are plenty of aspects of aging which will simply never be addressed by small molecules and absolutely will need gene therapies or cell therapies,” he said.
A 1,000-mouse test
The LEV Foundation is running what de Grey calls “the single most important” experiments in the field: a study of 1,000 mice that combines several treatments, starting when the animals are middle-aged and already two-thirds of the way through a normal lifespan. When he spoke to the filmmakers behind Live Beyond, the study was about six months old. “It’s looking damn good right now,” he said. “It’s looking like these combinations are adding up. They are doing better than any individual intervention does.”
He told Longevity.Technology that the lab can now extend mouse lifespan by about four months. He gave an 80 percent chance of reaching a full 12 months within three or four years, a tripling of the effect. The only delays, he said, are the time such experiments take and money the foundation has not yet raised.
Longevity escape velocity
The other idea he introduced in the early 2000s is longevity escape velocity, the point where medicine adds more than a year of healthy life for every year that passes. He admits academics still resist it. His argument: once therapies deliver the first 20 years or so of extra life, “we will have done the hard part.”
Asked for a forecast, he said he saw an 80 percent chance that a full war on aging would be under way within 10 years. He put the chance of actually reaching escape velocity in that window at 20 to 30 percent, and the 50 percent point at 12 to 15 years out.
He rejects the idea that drugmakers or regulators are the obstacle. “Big Pharma are not the bad guys. The FDA are not the bad guys. Even the government are not the bad guys,” he said. “The bad guys really are us, the scientists, not making a sufficiently strong case for preventative provision.”
De Grey also dislikes the word healthspan when it is used to cap lifespan at some natural limit. In his words, “lifespan is a side effect of healthspan. You stay alive by staying healthy.”
RAADfest 2025 runs from July 10 to 13 at the Red Rock Casino Resort and Spa in Las Vegas. Its organizers are also planning a longevity rights rally at the Lincoln Memorial in spring 2026, with a push to have aging classified as a disease.
Sources
- 'The more unashamedly we talk about radical life extension, the better'
- Aubrey de Grey · Live Beyond — the movie, the book and the mission
