How Aubrey de Grey Started His Scientific Career

Is this something that you still truly enjoy doing? I wouldn't say I ever enjoyed doing it. No? Really? I mean, I enjoy life. I enjoy just staring at the sky from my hot tub. It's just that I want to carry on doing it rather than dying instead. So almost... It's an investment. It's an investment, but it's also... It's obviously some sort of intellectual pursuit. No, not really. It's a humanitarian pursuit. I mean, some people view it as an intellectual pursuit, but I don't. I really feel... You know, ever since I was a young kid, I have wanted to spend my life making a difference to the world, improving the quality and, of course, in this case, quantity of life of humanity. And I'm just one of those incredibly lucky people. I've been able to end up in this position of essentially leading the crusade to do that in the biggest possible way. So this is something that you felt compelled to do from a really early age? Not the specific thing. So what actually happened was that as a teenager, having pretty much decided that this is what I wanted to do with my life, the first thing I did was I got into artificial intelligence research. And the reason that happened was because when I was a teenager, I tried my hand at programming. I found out I was pretty damn good at it. And I thought, well, okay, one of the big problems in the world is the problem of work, the fact that people have to spend so much of their time doing stuff that they would not do unless they were being paid for it. And therefore, we need more automation. So I work on that because I'm good at it. And I had no reason at that time to believe that I was going to be any good at biology, but specifically, particularly. And there were other people who were particularly good at biology. And I had made the mistaken but absolute assumption that everybody realized that aging was by far the world's biggest problem. And therefore, biologists would be working on it and grinding away. And of course, you didn't hear much. But hey, it's a really hard problem. So that's not a surprise. So it wasn't until my late 20s that I found out that I was wrong. What happened was that I met and married a biologist, quite a senior one actually, who was a full professor at that time at UC San Diego. She was in England on sabbatical. And through her, I not only learned a lot of biology just by accident, you know, over the dinner table, but I also found out gradually that she wasn't interested in aging. I just kind of, it hadn't occurred to me. So it didn't come up in conversation. I began to notice that it wasn't coming up in conversation. I started asking questions. And she would say things like, you know, well, I mean, like, it's just decay, isn't it? And I would say, well, yeah, but so what? And she said, well, I mean, you're not going to learn any fundamental truths about the universe from studying decay. And I would say, well, that's true. Yes, but it's bad for you. And she would say, but that's not my problem. And I would say, well, it kind of is. And that would be about as far as we would ever get. So eventually I came to terms with it because it wasn't just her, of course, it was all the other biologists I was meeting. It's a strange close-mindedness. Well, you know, as I say, people have had to find ways not to think about aging. And so eventually I thought, well, that's just what I might do. And I had to switch. I better switch fields. And I happened to have inveigled myself into a position where switching fields was something I was able to do. I had a very undemanding job at the University of Cambridge doing bioinformatics, which allowed me to do my artificial intelligence research in my spare time. I was being paid well enough. And I had access to university facilities and all that. So all I needed to do was repurpose my spare time and start paying my way to go to conferences because, of course, back then nobody knew me and I wasn't being invited. And so I went pretty well. I started doing quite well-received stuff. And so I became quite well-respected in the field very quickly. And for the first five years, that was all that was happening because I was basically harmless. And it was then five years in, in the year 2000, that I had this kind of eureka moment that damage repair was the way to go and started talking about what the impact could be. And people started to think I had gone completely crazy. And it took a little while for people to come around. So when you say that at an early age, you felt compelled to try to help people, like what was that? So what actually happened was this. It was all down to my mother's desire for me to practice the piano. You know, she wasn't a particularly good pianist herself, but she wanted me to learn how to play piano. And so she put pressure on me to practice all the time. And I was resistant. So somehow or other, my mother had already instilled in me a sense of introspection. You know, I decided to understand why I thought what I thought. So I actually decided to think about why I didn't want to play the piano. And it took very little time for me to realize that the fundamental reason I didn't want to spend so much time tapping away on this thing was that the best case and outcome of this would be that I would become a good pianist. And that was just not good enough, you know, because there were already lots of other good pianists. So I would not be, you know, contributing significantly to the quality of life of mankind by becoming just another one. An additional great pianist. That's right. And so I thought, well, I might do because of – and of course, this was about as young as it was gradual after that. How old were you at the time? Probably eight or nine. So over the next few years, I'm going to say, this general idea that I – playing the piano was a waste of time crystallized into the understanding, you know, that I could actually articulate that I wanted to make a difference to the world. And so that's how I – you know, by the time I was 15, was when I started programming, and I've just told you the rest. That's an interesting mapping out of your future. You know, at nine years old, recognizing you're not going to make a significant contribution to the world by doing something that other people have already done. Yeah, that's right. That's a really interesting way to look at the world when you're nine. I have a nine-year-old daughter. I can't imagine her thinking like that. I mean, when I started working actually at this bioinformatics project that I mentioned, I came – I had a lot of exposure to a lot of top-flight biologists. And it turned out that there were fields that were just fashionable, right? Yeah, and lots of top biologists would be competing vociferously with each other to make the next advance in one particular narrow area that was just really fashionable. Another area would be just completely neglected. And I thought, what is going on here? Why are these smart people choosing to do something that minimizes the likelihood that it will have any impact? In other words, basically, whatever they find out, they didn't – they themselves didn't matter at all because they could have been hit by a truck or done something completely different and someone else would have found out the exact same thing 10 minutes later. So they were making no difference. I never understood – I still don't understand it. So you've always felt compelled to make a difference. Is that something that your mother instilled in you? Is it something you just had as a child? Yeah, I don't really think my mother instilled in me. I think the introspection was – and if you asked me how she did that, I had no idea. But yeah, somehow or other – nah, I don't think so. But no, I think the – wanting to make a difference is just intrinsic in me and it's just something that I just realized as a result of the introspection. When you look back at that now, that's got to be an interesting course where you recognized at a very young age that you wanted to make some sort of a difference. But knowing that you would have that epiphany at a young age when it comes to like being a pianist or doing something that's going to significantly impact people, it is not a standard path that many people are gone. It's a very interesting way to set up your life. Well, I wouldn't say I set my life up. I'd say I had intentions, but if we look at how I got from there to here, an enormous, enormous amount of it was just sheer luck. Right. I mean, you know, if I – It affects people's lives. Right, exactly. So I would say I had a hope. I had a general aspiration. But I would say that I'm just incredibly privileged to have been able to reach the pinnacle of my chosen field of endeavor. Hardly anyone can say that. Yes. No, that is. You're also – well, you fit the part, too. You're a weirdo. I mean, you know you're a weirdo. Well, certainly. I say that with all due respect in a compliment as well. Of course. It definitely – it's definitely difficult to make a difference to the world if you're following the rules. And so I'm always instinctively looking for ways to do things that other people might have overlooked. I mean, even trivial things. Is there anything that frustrates you about this pursuit? I'm not an easily frustrated kind of guy. I mean, of course, sometimes it gets to me how slowly things are going, how resistant people are, how irrational the resistance is. But even there, you know, I've already – from some of the things I've already said, you understand that I'm really sympathetic to humanity in this regard. I understand that most people just – you know, the psychological burden of the prospect of physiological decline is so enormous that they've got no choice. They've got to put it out of their minds. And you know, some people feel, I don't know, psychologically stronger or whatever, and they can bite the bullet and actually work on this, even though it's a very, very long haul. But some people aren't, and that doesn't mean that they are no more – that they are less deserving of the benefits. It's a very strange thing where people put on intellectual blinders and they're talking about aging and dying. It is very weird. Have you had heated discussions with other intellectuals about this? Because I would imagine – All the time. All the time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing came to me first when I was at Cambridge, actually. As an undergrad, this was sometime before, of course, this was the early 1980s. So when I was in my first year, probably 1982, they brought in a stage hypnotist to do a show. You ever seen a stage hypnotist show? Yes. Okay. So this guy, you know, he's got an audience of a few hundred people. All of us, you know, Cambridge undergraduates. So the first step is, you know, do some stuff that gets some particularly amenable people into a light trance. And he brings a few of them up on stage and starts to go further. So there was this one particular part of the show that stuck in my mind. What happened was that this one guy was brought up and got into a really, really deep trance. And then the next step was that the hypnotist says, okay, this is actually your right elbow and this is your left elbow. So he switched the guy's elbows. Right. No elaboration of the implications of this, just saying, just getting the person to completely, completely, implicitly believe this thing. Right. And then he said, right, I would like you please to touch your right elbow with your left forefinger. Right. And so, of course, there was all this wriggling and writhing and so on. You know, couldn't do it. Right. And that was funny in and of itself. But that wasn't the coup de grâce. What happened next was the key thing. The hypnotist says, okay, you can stop now. And the guy stops and the hypnotist then says, you couldn't do it, could you? And the guy says, no. And then the hypnotist says, why not? That's the guy to explain why he couldn't do it. And here is the coup de grâce, because what happens is the guy gives a completely unhesitating, lucid, grammatically correct explanation for why he couldn't do it. And the explanation, of course, will have a hole in it the size of Canada. But the fact is, the guy won't see it. He'll just be sitting there with a straight face, just doing this. And his friends are out in the… And these are came to be undergrads, right? High IQ, high respect for each other's intellect and for their own intellect and rationality. And they're rolling in the aisles. And the guy's just unaffected. So when I started to have these discussions with people about aging and started to find out that people make these unbelievable arguments in favor of it, I've gone this way. I call it the pro-aging trance. And it was based on that experience from my youth.