Isegoria

Do You Want to Live Forever? looks at Cambridge computer scientist (and self-taught biologist) Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, who “is convinced that he has formulated the theoretical means by which human beings might live thousands of years — indefinitely, in fact”:

For reasons that his memory cannot now retrieve, de Grey has been convinced since childhood that aging is, in his words, ?something we need to fix.? Having become interested in biology after marrying a geneticist in 1991, he began poring over texts, and autodidacted until he had mastered the subject. The more he learned, the more he became convinced that the postponement of death was a problem that could very well have real solutions and that he might be just the person to find them. As he reviewed the possible reasons why so little progress had been made in spite of the remarkable molecular and cellular discoveries of recent decades, he came to the conclusion that the problem might be far less difficult to solve than some thought; it seemed to him related to a factor too often brushed under the table when the motivations of scientists are discussed, namely the small likelihood of achieving promising results within the ?period required for academic advancement — careerism, in a word. As he puts it, ?High-risk fields are not the most conducive to getting promoted quickly.?

De Grey began reading the relevant literature in late 1995 and after only a few months had learned so much that he was able to explain previously unidentified ?influences affecting mutations in mitochondria, the intracellular structures that release energy from certain chemical processes necessary to cell function. Having contacted an expert in this area of research who told him that he had indeed made a new discovery, he published his first biological research paper in 1997, in the peer-reviewed journal BioEssays (?A Proposed Refinement of the Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging,? de Grey, ADNJ, BioEssays 19(2)161?166, 1997). By July 2000, further assiduous application had brought him to what some have called his ?eureka moment,? the insight he speaks of as his realization that ?aging could be ?described as a reasonably small set of accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular changes in our bodies, each of which is potentially amenable to repair.? This concept became the theme of all the theoretical investigation he would do from that moment on; it became the leitmotif of his life. He determined to approach longevity as what can only be called a problem in engineering. If it is possible to know all the components of the variety of processes that cause animal tissues to age, he reasoned, it might also be possible to design remedies for each of them.

All along the way, de Grey would be continually surprised at the relative ease with which the necessary knowledge could be mastered — or at least, the ease with which he himself could master it.

In Renaissance Man, Adam Gopnik reviews a pair of new books on Leonarda da Vinci:

Leonardo remains weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it. He put wings on pet lizards and called them dragons; scribbled pyramidal parachutes in the margins of manuscripts which, more than five hundred years later, turn out to work perfectly; dashed off a letter to the Ottoman sultan offering to design a bridge that would span the Golden Horn (and the bridge he sketched, built elsewhere a few years ago, in a scaled-down version, not only is perfectly engineered but anticipates the look of Eero Saarinen?s T.W.A. terminal). He drew the Deluge, imagined the modern mortar, and fixed a half smile in the world?s imagination, and there was no one else around doing anything like it.