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Aubrey de Grey Weighs in on Heavy Water
Shchepinov’s idea has been embraced by one of my favorite biogerontologists, Aubrey de Grey, Dr. de Grey is a Cambridge researcher, and chairman and chief science officer of the Methuselah Foundation. He is one of the leading pioneers in aging research and I recently had the pleasure of interviewing de Grey about his fascinating ideas for “engineering immortality.”
If you missed that remarkable interview, I highly recommend you listen to it now.
Aubrey de Grey is also the editor of the journal Rejuvenation Research that published Shchepinov’s theory in 2007. Since then, de Grey has become the scientific advisor of Retrotope, the company Shchepinov launched to pursue his anti-aging theory.
Currently, Retrotope is not advocating heavy water as a cure for aging. Rather, they’re considering creating what Shchepinov calls “iFood.” This would be food products that have been already altered by the isotope effect (for example by feeding chickens heavy water), so your body’s proteins would receive nutrients that already had their vulnerable bonds strengthened, hence being less prone to free radical damage.
I’m not surprised that Dr. de Grey has chosen to support this new anti-aging theory. After all, his own “strategies for engineering negligible senescence” (SENS) plan focuses on finding the main causes of age-related damage and using science to prevent or reverse them.
According to Dr. de Grey, nature has not specifically pre-programmed you to die, as there is no “death gene”. You don’t perish because of some internal clock counting down to death, but because nature doesn’t bother to promote self-healing past a certain point.
He claims there are seven major known causes of aging:
cell loss
death resistant cells (that overstay their welcome)
nuclear DNA mutations
mitochondrial DNA mutations
intracellular junk
extracellular junk
extracellular crosslinks (which link together molecules that should be kept separated)
From a strictly biological standpoint, the maximum lifespan of human beings seems to be set at around 120 years. However, I do believe it’s possible to extend your lifespan well beyond this with the regenerative technologies that Dr. de Grey discusses.
And, who knows, perhaps heavy water will one day be one of them, although I believe there’s still a lot of research that needs to be done before we unleash yet another manipulated food product. The theory appears sound, but nature has a way of rebelling against too much of a good thing.
