Can you imagine yourself living for up to 1,000 years old? If you think this is impossible, a British scientist is pulling all the stops to make this happen.
Dr. Aubrey de Grey, who has dedicated his profession to studying how human beings can achieve eternal life, said he is getting closer to finding a way to make humans live up to a millennium, thereby beating current records for the oldest living person.
How will this even be possible? De Grey is looking at techniques that concern "repairing the effects of ageing."
The British scientist, who graduated from Cambridge University in 1985, is looking into creating preventative treatments that would enable human beings to consistently re-repair ageing cells, making significantly longer lives possible.
"To me, ageing was the world's most important problem. It was so obvious that I never tested the assumption. I always presumed that everyone else thought the same," De Grey told The Daily Express.
Although his theories have not been widely accepted by his peers, De Grey is bent on disproving the "crazy concept that ageing is natural and inevitable." He interprets ageing similar to the wear-and-tear of machines.
"The human body is a machine with moving parts and like a car or an aeroplane, it accumulates damage throughout life as a consequence of normal operation," the British scientist said.
Dr. Tilo Kunath of the Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, however, is not impressed with De Grey's ideas.
He maintained that it is impossible for science to make someone live even up to 120 years old now or in the future.
"Many people put up prizes for anyone who can come up with the secret, Google has put up prizes, but Mr. De Grey is wrong. He should be able to do it with an animal," Kunath also told The Express.
"But it can't even be done with a mouse," he added.
