Aubrey de Grey is not your typical scientist. With a long beard and ponytail, and dressed faded jeans and a t-shirt, he ended his talk at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference with the challenge: "If you think that I'm wrong, you'd better damn well go and find out why you think I'm wrong." Oh yeah-and he believes it's possible for human beings to live to be a thousand years old.

De Grey may not be conventional in his thinking or presentation, but he is an accomplished scientist and fascinating individual. He speaks in a quick British accent, calls the pub his "natural habitat," and received his Ph.D. from Cambridge in 2000. According to his website, SENS.org, his goal is to "expedite the development of a true cure for human aging," and like the American Academy for Anti-Aging, de Grey feels that there is a bias against this type of research. He calls it the "pro-aging trance," and challenges us as a society to move beyond it.

"Getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun," de Grey says. However, most of us expect to do just that, and react to the idea of living forever with excuses about overpopulation, social security, boredom, and the fact that aging and death is "natural."

Actually, says de Grey, "aging is a side affect of being alive in the first place." It is not necessarily "natural" and certainly not desirable.

De Grey's solution? Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), de Grey's plan to cure human aging. SENS takes an engineering rather than medical approach. The idea is to repair the damage that results in pathology, aging, and death. Rather than trying to prevent the damage (like gerontologists) or attempting to keep the damage from resulting in pathology (like geriatricians), de Grey's solution is, "let's go in and repair the damage."

De Grey says that, until now, doctors have dealt with the problems of aging by attempting to change the patient's metabolism, but "unfortunately, we don't understand metabolism very well. In fact, we have a pitifully poor understanding of metabolism."

What we do understand, however, are the seven types of damage that cause pathology, aging, and death. And the even-better news is that de Grey says we know how to fix them all-"in theory, in mice." What we learn how to do in mice, however, can be transferred to the human race, as long as scientists are provided with funding and support.

Organizations such as the American Academy for Anti-Aging and the Methuselah Foundation are working hard to ensure that such research continues, but de Grey worries about the public perception that "aging is ghastly, but... inevitable, so, you know, we've got to find some way of putting it out of our minds." He even goes to far as to call for scientists to "evangelize" the good news that aging is not inevitable. When humans stop believing that we have to die, there will be no excuse not to fund longevity research.

De Grey says that, like aeronautics or computers, anti-aging research only needs one big breakthrough in order to keep ahead of the curve. If we can increase human lifespans by fifty years, we will have fifty years to improve that technology before the current population ran out of time. He points out that it took hundreds of years for humans to take their first flight in 1903, but the improvements since then have been staggering. Ultimately, aging would become a choice-a choice that de Grey feels we should allow future generations to make for themselves. Not laying the medical foundations for this choice, he feels, would be "immoral."

De Grey has written extensively on this subject, and his website contains many articles for the general public. His forthcoming work, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime, will be available on September 4th, 2007, and is co-authored with Michael Rae.

In the book, de Grey promises readers will learn about the actual science behind SENS. It is written for both scientists and non-scientists, a "step by step, detailed explanation of how we could achieve radical life extension within our lifetimes, as best we understand from our present knowledge of our biochemistry." If you can't wait until September, you can check out de Grey's 1999 The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, a dense text that provides a model of mammalian aging and a discussion of how that may be manipulated.

The proceeds from Ending Aging will go directly to the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit organization whose tagline is "research to repair and reverse the damage of aging." If that sounds overly generous, it won't be surprising to find out that de Grey does happen to be the chairman and chief science officer.

The book seems cleverly positioned to attract controversy, with a cover that describes de Grey as both a genius and a criminal: Dr. Sherwin Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at Yale University School of Medicine and author of How We Die and The Art of Aging, is quoted in MIT's Technology Review as saying that de Gray's "clarion call to action is the message neither of a madman nor a bad man, but of a brilliant, beneficent man of goodwill, who wants only for civilization to fulfill the highest hopes he has for its future." In contrast, Dr. Martin Raff, emeritus professor of biology at University College London and coauthor of Molecular Biology of the Cell, says it "seems to me this man could be put in jail with reasonable cause."

Why is de Grey getting such harsh criticism from his peers? Ironically, it seems to be the very thing that makes him so attractive. Never settling for talking about current research findings, he prefers taking things to their logical conclusions - their most extreme logical conclusions. And this can make people feel uncomfortable.

Nuland explains his own reactions, "I have no desire to live beyond the life span that nature has granted to our species. For reasons that are pragmatic, scientific, demographic, economic, political, social, emotional, and secularly spiritual, I am committed to the notion that both individual fulfillment and the ecological balance of life on this planet are best served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do."

The Methuselah Foundation is currently sponsoring three teams in Phoenix, Houston, and Cambridge, and de Grey says the research is going well. The teams are focusing on two of the most important SENS strands, "LysoSENS, the identification and exploitation of microbial enzymes to break down molecules that we cannot naturally degrade, and MitoSENS, the incorporation of modified copies of the mitochondrial DNA into the chromosomal DNA so that mitochondrial mutations will have no effect."

De Grey is an ambitious man. He wants to increase the human lifespan by one year every year-so by the time today's college students would normally be thinking of retiring, they won't even have reached middle age. But can he actually accomplish it? The proof is, as they say, in the pudding. It will be interesting to see what de Grey accomplishes in the next few years.