Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey (; born 20 April 1963) is an English biomedical gerontologist. He is the author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007). De Grey is known for his view that medical technology may enable human beings alive today not to die from age-related causes. As an amateur mathematician, he contributed to the study of the Hadwiger–Nelson problem in geometric graph theory, making the first progress on the problem in over 60 years. In 2003 he co-founded the Methuselah Foundation and stepped away from it around 2009. In 2009 he co-founded the SENS Research Foundation and served as its Chief Science Officer until 2021, when he departed after allegedly attempting to interfere in a probe investigating sexual harassment allegations against him. In 2013, De Grey worked as an international adjunct professor of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. De Grey is President and Chief Science Officer of the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation and editor of the Rejuvenation Research journal.
Early life and education De Grey was born on 20 April 1963 and brought up in London, England. He told The Observer that he never knew his father, and that his mother Cordelia, an artist, encouraged him in the areas in which she herself was weakest: science and mathematics. De Grey was educated at Sussex House School and Harrow School. He attended university at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in computer science in 1985.
Career After graduation in 1985, de Grey joined Sinclair Research as an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and software engineer. In 1986, along with SRL colleague Aaron Turner, he co-founded Man-Made Minions Ltd. in order to pursue the development of an automated formal program verifier. At a graduate party in Cambridge, de Grey met fruit fly geneticist Adelaide Carpenter, whom he would marry in 1991. Through her, he was introduced to the intersection of biology and programming when her boss needed someone who knew about computers and biology to take over the running of a database on fruit flies. In the early 1990s, he switched fields from AI research to biomedical gerontology, after realising 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. From 1992 to 2006, he was in charge of software development at the university's Genetics Department for the FlyBase genetic database. Cambridge awarded de Grey a Ph.D. by publication in biology on 9 December 2000. The degree was based on his 1999 book The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, in which de Grey wrote that obviating damage to mitochondrial DNA might by itself extend lifespan significantly, though he said it was more likely that cumulative damage to mitochondria is a significant cause of senescence, but not the single dominant cause.
Strategies In 2005, de Grey argued that most of the fundamental knowledge needed to develop effective anti-aging medicine already exists, and that the science is ahead of the funding. He described his work as identifying and promoting specific technological approaches to the reversal of various aspects of aging, or, as he puts it, "... the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us."
As of 2005, de Grey's work centered on a detailed plan called strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS), which is aimed at preventing age-related physical and cognitive decline. In March 2009, he co-founded the SENS Research Foundation (named SENS Foundation until early 2013), a non-profit organisation based in California, United States, where he served until 2021 as Chief Science Officer. The foundation "works to develop, promote and ensure widespread access to regenerative medicine solutions to the disabilities and diseases of aging", focusing on the strategies for engineered negligible senescence. Before March 2009, the SENS research program was mainly pursued by the Methuselah Foundation, co-founded by de Grey. A major activity of the Methuselah Foundation is the Methuselah Mouse Prize, a prize designed to incentivize research into effective life extension interventions by awarding monetary prizes to researchers who stretch the lifespan of mice to unprecedented lengths. De Grey stated in March 2005 "if we are to bring about real regenerative therapies that will benefit not just future generations, but those of us who are alive today, we must encourage scientists to work on the problem of aging." The prize reached US$4.2 million in February 2007. In 2007, de Grey wrote the book Ending Aging with the assistance of Michael Rae. In a 2008 broadcast on Franco-German TV network Arte, de Grey claimed that the first human to live 1,000 years was probably already alive, and might even be between 50 and 60 years old already. In 2012, de Grey inherited more than US$16 million, US$13 million of which he donated to the SENS Research Foundation.
In 2022, de Grey started the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation, which funded and launched a project focusing on robust mouse rejuvenation.
Mathematics On 8 April 2018, de Grey posted a paper to arXiv explicitly constructing a unit-distance graph in the plane that cannot be colored with fewer than five colors, increasing the previously known lower bound by one and making the first progress on the problem in over 60 years. The previous lower bound of four was due to the problem's original proposal in 1950 by Hugo Hadwiger and Edward Nelson. De Grey's graph has 1581 vertices, but it has since been reduced to 510 by independent researchers.
AgeX Therapeutics De Grey was formerly Vice President of New Technology Discovery at AgeX Therapeutics, a startup in the longevity space helmed by Michael D. West. He was appointed to the position within the company in July 2017.
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