The Man Who Would Murder Death looks at anti-aging “prophet” Aubrey de Grey. While his scientific ideas are fascinating, so are some of his biographical details:
The man who brought them together began his career as a computer scientist, working for several years on programs that find bugs in other programs. He later received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Cambridge and devoted himself, in a sense, to finding the bugs in human beings.An important turning point in Mr. de Grey’s personal and professional life occurred at a friend’s party in 1990. That’s when he met Adelaide Carpenter, who would later become Adelaide de Grey. When they met, Mr. de Grey was a computer scientist in his twenties and had never been married. His wife-to-be was in her forties and had been married twice before. Despite the 19-year age difference, they fell for each other immediately and have been together ever since.
At the time, Ms. de Grey was on sabbatical from her position as a professor of genetics at the University of California at San Diego. She had already established her reputation in the discipline (and made some discoveries that are now in textbooks) and had a comfortable, tenured position. But she had grown tired of her research and her job. So, after she met Mr. de Grey, she decided to quit, move to Cambridge, and work as a technician in a fruit-fly laboratory. It was a big step down professionally, but she enjoyed her work and the company of her new husband.
The age difference was unimportant to Ms. de Grey: What mattered to her was intellectual compatibility. ‘I need my male partner to be smarter than I am,’ she explains. ‘And — I’m trying to be modest here — that narrows down the field quite a bit.’ Does her husband fit that bill? She nods vigorously. ‘Oh yes.’
Ms. de Grey taught her husband genetics over the dinner table. She was amazed at how quickly he could absorb the concepts. ‘Very shortly we were able to have a conversation rather than a tutorial,’ she says. While talking about her academic career and her relationship, Ms. de Grey is puffing away steadily on an unfiltered Camel. Mr. de Grey would like her to quit, but she’s been a smoker since she was a teenager and believes that nicotine is necessary to kick-start her brain. Unlike her husband, Ms. de Grey has no wish to live forever. She has not agreed to be cryogenically frozen when she dies. (Mr. de Grey has, just in case medicine does not advance speedily enough to save him.)
‘I don’t think anyone would want to thaw me out,’ she says and smiles, revealing a mouth mostly devoid of teeth.
When the software project Mr. de Grey had been working on didn’t pan out, he got a part-time job designing a database for fruit-fly researchers at the lab where his wife worked. It is a position he still holds; as it turns out, being a prophet is not a sufficiently remunerative profession. In 1995, after having absorbed a great deal of genetics, Mr. de Grey moved on to gerontology, a subject that had always intrigued him. For two months he immersed himself in the literature. He emerged with an insight into the mechanics of mitochondrial mutations, wrote a paper on what he thought, and submitted it to a respected journal.
It was accepted. He was off to a good start.