Having originally started in the field of artificial intelligence, De Grey worked until 2006 in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. After we created the SENS platform, an engineering project for curing human ageing and is the Chairman and Chief Science Officer of the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit charity dedicated to combating the ageing process.

View the film (24.5 MB. QuickTime 7 required).

above: Aubrey de Grey with Susana Soares, filmed by Steve Jackman

The goal of the foundation is to promote and fund research that aims to defeat ageing. During this conversation with De Grey we discussed that people are living longer and as a consequence we are living old longer than ever - more frail, less mobile, less mentally acute.

We also considerer the advantages and disadvantages of implementing really effective ways to avoid disease and debilitation of ageing, restoring the body to a more useful stage.

Some questions emerged during the conversation:

• Life, as we conceived now, will be completely different, what will be the new social context?
• How things will be distributed within the population?
• Will people be bored? Will people have several careers throughout their life?
• How sustainable is an ever growing specie? Will people have less children or none?

Aubrey believes that if we make the breakthrough by addressing the destructive events by which ageing is defined "the advantages are enormous and outweigh considering the disadvantages" for example "people are not going to get frail, decrepit, and sick when they get older and at the moment we are spending an unbelievable amount of money helping to keep elderly population alive an extra year...if some of that money go to prevention instead curing" because the human capital and experience is "tremendous precious".

Aubrey De Grey argues that "we have the moral obligation to develop this therapies as soon as possible so as to give the society that choice, if you don't do that we are imposing are own values to the future"

Aubrey de Grey was Inerviewed by Susana Soares on 07/12/07