Aubrey de Grey, 44 Going on 1,000, Wants out of Old Age. He may be wrong but, evidence suggests, he's not nuts. This is a no small assertion. De Grey argues that some people alive today will live in a robust and youthful fashion for 1,000 years.

奧伯瑞．德葛雷，44歲，準備活到一千歲，而且永遠不老。他也許錯了，但證據顯示，他可沒瘋。他的觀點非同小可。德葛雷聲稱，今天在世有些人將可健康年輕活上一千年。

Dodging death has long been a dream. The Greek goddess Eos pre-vails on Zeus to allow her human lover Tithonus to live eternally, for-getting, unfortunately, to ask that he also not become aged and frail. He winds up such a dried husk she turns him into a grasshopper.

逃避死亡長久以來一直是人類的夢想。希臘黎明女神伊歐絲說動天神宙斯，讓她身為凡人的愛人提托諾斯可以長生不死，但不幸忘了要求讓他不會年老體衰。最後他只剩一副乾枯的軀殼，她只好把他變成蚱蜢。

De Grey, of Britain's Cambridge University, advocates not myth but "strategies for engineering negligible senescence," or SENS. It means cur-ing aging. With adequate funding, de Grey thinks scientists may, within a decade, triple the remaining life span of late-middle-age mice. The day this announcement is made, he be-lieves, the news will hit people like a brick as they realize that their cells could be next.

德葛雷出身英國劍橋大學，他的主張不是神話而是「製造忽視老化策略」，也就是治療老化。只要有足夠的經費，德葛雷認為科學家可以在十年內，將中老年鼠的餘命延長三倍。他相信，宣布這項消息那天，人類將有如醍醐灌頂，明白人的細胞將是下一步。

Peter Thiel, the co-founder and former CEO of PayPal -- who sold it in 2002 for $1.5 billion, pocketing $55 million himself -- has dropped $3.5 million on de Grey's Methuselah Foundation.

PayPal共同創辦人兼前執行長席爾在2002年以15億美元賣了公司，除了5500萬落袋，他並砸下350萬美元投資德葛雷的瑪士撒拉（聖經中以諾之子，據傳活到969歲）基金會。

"Of course the world will be com-pletely different in all manner of ways," de Grey says of the next few decades.“If we want to hit the high points, number one is, there will not be any frail elderly people. Which means we won't be spending all this unbeliev-able amount of money keeping all those frail elderly people alive for like one extra year the way we do at the moment. That money will be avail-able to spend on important things like providing the health care, but that won't be anything like so expensive. Secondly, just doing the things we can't afford now, giving people proper education and not just when they're kids, but also adult education and re-training and so on.

德葛雷談起未來數十年時說：「不管在任何方面，世界當然會完全不同。如果我們能登峰造極，第一，將不會再有任何老邁羸弱的人。這意味我們不用再像現在這樣令人不敢相信的花大把錢，只為了讓那些年邁體衰的人多活一年。那些錢會花在更重要的事，像提供健康照護上，但不用花這麼多錢。其次，去做些我們現在無法做的事，像提供適當的教育，不只在孩童時期，也要提供成人教育和再訓練等等。

"Another thing that's going to have to change completely is retirement. For the moment, when you retire, you retire forever. We're sorry for old people because they're going downhill. There will be no real moral or soci-ological requirement to do that. Sure, there is going to be a need for Social Security as a safety net just as there is now. But retirement will be a peri-odic thing. You'll be a journalist for 40 years or whatever and then you'll be sick of it and you'll retire on your savings or on a state pension, de-pending on what the system is. So af-ter 20 years, golf will have lost its novelty value, and you'll want to do something else with your life. You'll get more retraining and education, and go and be a rock star for 40 years, and then retire again and so on."

「另一件完全改變的事是退休。現在當你退休就永遠退休，我們對老年人感到難過，因為他們正在走下坡。其實，不管道德上或社會上都毋需如此。當然，一如現在，還是要有社會安全福利網路，但退休是周期性的。你當新聞工作者或其他什麼工作40年後，當你感到厭倦退休時，你會有筆存款或國家退休金，視當時制度而定。再過20年，高爾夫球又喪失了新鮮感，你又希望人生能做點別的，你接受再訓練和教育，又當搖滾明星40年，然後再退休，周而復始。」

The mind reels. Will we want to be married to the same person for a thousand years Will we need religion anymore Will the planet fill to over-flowing

思緒一轉，我們會希望一千年都和同一個人結婚嗎？我們還會需要宗教信仰嗎？地球會不會人滿為患？

De Grey became the archenemy of aging in two steps.

德葛雷分兩階段成為老化的頭號敵人。

"The first stage happened when I was probably 8 or 9 years old. My mother wanted me to practice the pi-ano, and I would resist it. I would make a minimal difference in the world, because there were plenty of other very good pianists already. What I actually wanted to do with my life is make a difference to the world. That led me into science very quickly," he said. Computer science filled his undergraduate years at
Cambridge and became the field in which he spent more than a decade.

「第一個階段在我八、九歲時發生。我母親要我學鋼琴，但我抗命不從。我在這個世界起不了什麼作用，因為已經有太多其他極優秀的鋼琴家。我這輩子真正想做的是要使世界改觀，這使我很快進入科學領域，」他說。在劍橋大學那幾年，他一直在研讀電腦，而且在這個領域投入十多年。

The second stage started when he was 26. De Grey fell in love with and married a geneticist, Adelaide Car-penter, who is 19 years his senior. He learned a lot of biology over the din-ner table, he says, and gradually be-came driven by the notion that "aging is responsible for two-thirds of all death -- now that means worldwide 100,000 people every single day -- and in the industrialized world, it is something like 90 percent." The fur-ther he got into Carpenter's world and that of her senior colleagues, the more incensed he became that biolo-gists and gerontologists just accept this carnage.

第二階段始於26歲那年。德葛雷戀愛結婚，娶了遺傳學家艾德蕾．卡本特，她比他年長19歲。他說，從餐桌上他學了很多生物學上的知識，同時逐漸被「老化造成三分之二人口死亡，今天這意味每天全球因而死了十萬人，在工業國，老化更造成九成人口死亡」這個念頭緊咬不放。他愈深入卡本特及她那些年長同事的世界，對生物學家和老年學家面對這場大屠殺竟坐以待斃深感憤怒。

So he got his PhD in biology from Cambridge and started scattering ideas like viruses. Aging consists of seven critical kinds of damage, according to de Grey. For example, unwholesome goo accumulates in our cells. Our bodies have not evolved means quickly to clean up "intracellular ag-gregates such as lipofuscin." However, outside our bodies, microorganisms have eagerly and rapidly evolved to turn this toxic waste into compost.

因此他重回劍橋大學拿了生物學博士學位，並開始像病毒一樣散播他的理念。據德葛雷指出，老化包括七種重傷害，像有害身心健康的黏液累積在我們細胞中，我們的身體未進化，意味著未能迅速清除「細胞內像脂褐素等分子殘質的堆積。」但在體外，微生物迫不急待快速演化，把這些有毒廢棄物轉變為堆肥。

"It's a repair and maintenance ap-proach to extending the functional life span of a human body," de Grey says. "It's just like maintaining the func-tional life span of a classic car, or a house. Once you have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of interventions to get rid of damage and maintain these things, then, they can last indef-initely. The only reason we don't see that in the human body now is that the panel of interventions we have available to us today is not sufficiently comprehensive."

德葛雷說：「要以修復和維修的方法延長人體機能壽命，就像維修一部古董車或一幢老房子的機能壽命。只要充分周延控制干預，就可以除去老年造成的損壞並加以維修，之後就可以永久使用。人體目前之所以未見此發展，只因為今天我們干預控制的範圍不夠充分廣泛。」（取材自華盛頓郵報）