Special Meetup: Aubrey De Gray

Please note that this meetup is not on our usual day of the week!

Few figures have done more to reframe the moral urgency of aging research than Aubrey de Grey. A biomedical gerontologist and visionary in the truest sense of that word, Aubrey has spent decades arguing that aging isn’t an inevitable fact of life to be accepted⁠—it’s a medical problem to be solved. His SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) framework proposed that the accumulated cellular and molecular damage underlying aging could be periodically repaired, much like maintaining a machine, and that doing so systematically might allow people to live in good health far beyond what we currently consider normal.

More recently, as President and Chief Science Officer of the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation, Aubrey has been putting that framework to the test. The LEV Foundation’s flagship Robust Mouse Rejuvenation study combined four well-studied longevity interventions⁠—mTERT, rapamycin, a senolytic, and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation⁠—administered in combination to middle-aged mice. The results, now complete and under analysis, represent what Aubrey has called a “qualified win”: evidence that combining partial interventions can additively extend lifespan beyond what any single intervention achieves alone. The next phase will scale that combination to eight interventions, pushing further toward what Aubrey calls “longevity escape velocity”⁠—the point at which medical progress outpaces the rate at which we age.

Aubrey has been a friend of the Mormon Transhumanist Association for many years, and we’re delighted to report that a fortunate scheduling coincidence brings him to Provo for a few days in August. He’s agreed to spend an evening with us⁠—informally, among old friends. We expect the conversation to include an update on where the longevity field stands right now, what the Robust Mouse Rejuvenation results actually tell us (and don’t tell us), and whatever else is on his mind. Aubrey has never been short on wisdom, provocation, or candor, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

This is a rare and genuinely exciting opportunity. Come ready to listen, ask hard questions, and think seriously about what it might mean to actually solve aging in our lifetimes.