Aubrey de Grey’s wife hasn’t killed him despite the fact that he lives with his two younger girlfriends, so it’s hard to blame the guy for feeling immortal.

In the 2014 documentary The Immortalists, the radical gerontologist’s fascinating personal and professional lives were on display. In that film, de Grey discussed why he feels we’re close to defeating death, which will allow him to frolic forever in his Northern California idyll with his Eves, but I will (regretfully) argue he’s wrong. I’d like him (and the rest of us) to have eternal life, but I doubt those of us breathing today will know an endless summer. There’s nothing theoretically impossible about, at least, extending life significantly, but it will require time, which is the one thing we don’t have. At any rate, it’s a growth industry with ballooning funding.

From Lucy Ingham at Factor-Tech:

It’s an exciting time to be working in ageing research. New findings are coming thick and fast, and although eliminating the process in humans is still some way away, studies regularly confirm what some have suspected for decades: that the mechanisms of ageing can be treated.

“It’s an amazingly gratifying field to be part of,” says biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, chief science officer and founder of SENS Research Foundation, the leading organisation tackling ageing. “It moves on almost every week at the moment.”

At the start of February, for example, a study was published that had hugely significant findings for the field.

“There was a big announcement in Nature showing that if you eliminate a certain type of cell from mice, then they live quite a bit longer,” says de Grey. “Even if you do that elimination rather late; in other words when they’re already in middle age.”

For those following the field, this was exciting news, but for de Grey, it was concrete proof that ageing can be combated.

“That’s the kind of thing that I’ve been promoting for a long time, and it’s been coming but it’s been pretty tricky to actually demonstrate directly. This was really completely unequivocal proof of concept,” he says. “So of course it motivates lots of work to identify ways to do the same thing in human beings. These kinds of things are happening all the time now.”•

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“This is not science fiction.”