Aubrey de Grey

Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, born 20 April 1963, is an English biomedical gerontologist whose public profile has been built around one of modern medicine’s largest questions: whether age-related death can be delayed or avoided through medical technology. He is best known for arguing that people alive today may be able not to die from age-related causes, a view he developed through books, research programs, foundations, and public claims about the future of rejuvenation medicine.

De Grey was brought up in London. He told The Observer that he never knew his father, and that his mother, Cordelia, an artist, encouraged him in the areas where she felt weakest: science and mathematics. He studied at Sussex House School and Harrow School, then attended Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in computer science in 1985. After graduation he joined Sinclair Research as an artificial intelligence researcher and software engineer, and in 1986 co-founded Man-Made Minions Ltd. with Aaron Turner to pursue an automated formal program verifier.

His move from computing into biology came through fruit fly geneticist Adelaide Carpenter, whom he met at a graduate party in Cambridge and married in 1991. Through her, he encountered work that combined biology and programming, including the need to manage a fruit fly database. From 1992 to 2006, he was in charge of software development for the FlyBase genetic database at the University of Cambridge Genetics Department. In the early 1990s he shifted from AI research to biomedical gerontology after realizing, as he put it, that “biologists by and large were not terribly interested in doing anything about aging.” He educated himself in biology by reading journals and textbooks, attending conferences, and being tutored by Professor Carpenter.

Cambridge awarded de Grey a Ph.D. by publication in biology on 9 December 2000, based on his 1999 book The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging. In that work, he wrote that preventing damage to mitochondrial DNA might extend lifespan significantly, while also stating that mitochondrial damage was more likely a significant cause of senescence than the single dominant cause. In 2007, he co-authored Ending Aging with Michael Rae. By 2005, his work centered on strategies for engineered negligible senescence, or SENS, a plan aimed at preventing age-related physical and cognitive decline.

De Grey co-founded the Methuselah Foundation in 2003 and stepped away from it around 2009. One of its major activities was the Methuselah Mouse Prize, designed to encourage research into life extension by rewarding researchers who extended the lifespan of mice; by February 2007, the prize had reached US$4.2 million. In March 2009, he co-founded the SENS Research Foundation in California and served as its Chief Science Officer until 2021, when he departed after he had allegedly attempted to interfere in a probe investigating sexual harassment allegations against him. He later became President and Chief Science Officer of the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation, which he started in 2022 and which funded and launched a project focused on robust mouse rejuvenation.

De Grey’s work has also reached beyond gerontology. As an amateur mathematician, he contributed to the Hadwiger-Nelson problem in geometric graph theory in 2018, posting a paper that made the first progress on the problem in more than 60 years. His career has moved across software engineering, genetics databases, aging theory, foundation leadership, and mathematics, always with a taste for hard problems. For a quotes website, his line “Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it” fits the practical cast of his life: a reminder to revise one’s thinking when the evidence, or the problem itself, demands it.