Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime [Paperback]

Think of all the suffering and waste of human potential caused by aging. Aubrey de Grey wants to change that, and he has an original approach to the problem (which he calls SENS - Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence).

Instead of trying to understand everything about metabolism or pathologies, he's focusing on repairing the damage caused by metabolism *before* it can create pathologies. It is basically the approach of repairing the roof of your house periodically to avoid catastrophic failure -- to be able to do that you don't need to understand all the causality chains that create the damage, you just need to know how to repair it.

This book has inspired me to learn about molecular biology and biochemistry. I've ordered a few textbooks. I think that this, in itself, is the highest recommendation for the book; anything that can inspire to learn more and get involved (I also donated to the Methuselah Foundation) is special. I highly recommend this book. It is well-written, easy to understand for the lay person yet detailed.

This book has a clear mission - we don't need to grow old and die sick. Because our evolution has seen us die young of illness or injury, we are simply unprepared, genetically to last a very long time. Dr. de Grey highlights the 7 classes of aging illnesses that we all have; think of them as terminal diseases that we're all born with. He then goes into detail about the work that has been done to combat each thus far and presents ideas for further study. The idea isn't that somebody will develop a magic cure for all aging or a fountain of youth, but rather that a cure comprised of many different treatments will attack the different buildups of pollutants in our bodies to prevent the decay that accumulates over time. For example, this book goes into detail about "amyloid protein buildup" - the root cause of Alzheimer's disease and methods we've employed to turn the body's own immune system against the pathogen responsible.

Dr. de Grey also touches on the politics of aging - the resistance many people feel because "we're all supposed to get old and die," akin to the resistance against antibiotics expressed by some religious fundamentalists, or the resistance against organ transplants and blood transfusions that pervaded when these were new medical advances. His hope is to raise scientific research funds to be used to usher in a new age of health and productivity, whereinwhich people may become injured and die or may become ill and die, but will not simply grow weak and sick because they have lived for 100 years.

The book is a fantastic read, not only because it conveys the modern medical advances of geriatrics in layman's terms, but because it is written from a forward looking optimism that gives the reader a "yes we can" point of view on the future of aging. There are children alive today who will likely see their 200th birthdays and this book turns that pie-in-the-sky statement into a logical conclusion, of course making a few assumptions about our future progress in our current research.

It's a wonderful read that I couldn't put down and have recommended to friends and family who have a penchant for light science reading, evolutionary biology, and medicine.

A great book for intelligent people without any background in Biology. It made me want to take action helping the SENS foundation