Aubrey de Grey wins 2004 H.G. Wells Award for Outstanding Transhumanist of the Year

Winner of the 2004 H.G. Wells Award:
Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D.

Aubrey de Grey, born in England in 1963, is a biogerontologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. He designs interventions to reverse (not just retard) the cellular and molecular changes that accumulate with age and reduce remaining life expectancy (i.e., cause aging).  He has coined the term “strategies for engineered negligible senescence” (SENS) to describe these interventions, which he has argued are the only feasible way to extend human lifespan by more than a decade. He has published widely on such technology (see http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/AdGpubs.htm. He is also the co-founder and chief scientist of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, a contest designed to accelerate research into effective life extension interventions by awarding prizes to researchers who extend the lifespan of mice to unprecedented lengths.

“The central goal of my biogerontology work is to expedite the development of a true cure for human aging. In my view, the main obstacle to developing such technology is the position of biogerontology at the boundary between basic science and medicine: the fundamental knowledge necessary to develop truly effective anti-aging medicine mostly exists, but the goal-directed frame of mind that is best suited to turning research findings into tools is very different from the curiosity-driven ethos that generated those findings in the first place. As a scientist with a training in an engineering discipline (computer science), I am unusually well placed to bridge this gap. I attempt to do so in three main ways: I do basic biogerontology research, I identify and promote specific technological approaches to the reversal (not merely the prevention) of various aspects of aging, and I argue in a wide range of fora (extending well beyond biologists) for the adoption of a more proactive approach to extending the healthy human lifespan sooner rather than later.” – Aubrey de Grey

Society memberships:
International Association of Biomedical Gerontology (Board of Directors)
British Society for Research on Ageing
American Aging Association (Board of Directors)
Gerontological Society of America (Fellow)
International Coenzyme Q10 Association
Mitochondrion Research Society

Journal editorial board memberships:
Rejuvenation Research (editor-in-chief)
Antioxidants and Redox Signaling
Mitochondrion (associate editor)
Betterhumans (Editorial Board)

Aubrey de Grey accepting his award from Mike Treder in 2004

H.G. Wells Award for Outstanding Transhumanist Contributions of the Year

The World Transhumanist Association is proud to announce the foundation of its latest annual award, the “H. G. Wells Award for Outstanding Transhumanist Contributions of the Year.”

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was an English futurist and writer best known for his science fiction novels, such as The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.

H. G. Well’s first bestseller was Anticipations, published in 1901. Perhaps his most explicitly futuristic work, it bore the subtitle “An Experiment in Prophecy” when originally serialized in a magazine. The book is particularly interesting for its prescience - trains and cars result in the dispersion of population from cities to suburbs, and moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom.

His early novels, called “scientific romances”, invented a number of themes now classic in science fiction in such works as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds and are often thought of as being influenced by the works of Jules Verne.

He called his political views socialist, and with his fondness for Utopias, he was at first quite sympathetic to Lenin’s attempts at reconstructing the shattered Russian economy, as his account of a visit (Russia in the Shadows 1920) shows. But he grew disillusioned at the doctrinal rigidity of the Bolsheviks, and after meeting Stalin grew convinced the whole enterprise had gone horribly wrong.

From quite early in his career, he sought a better way to organize society, and wrote a number of Utopian novels. Usually starting with the world rushing to catastrophe, until people realize a better way of living: whether by mysterious gases from a comet causing people to behave rationally (In the Days of the Comet), or a world council of scientists taking over, as in The Shape of Things to Come (1933), which he later adapted for the 1938 Alexander Korda film, Things to Come. This depicted, all too accurately, the impending World War, with cities being destroyed by aerial bombs.

Wells contemplated the ideas of Nature vs Nurture and questioned human motives in books like The Island of Dr. Moreau. Not all his scientific romances ended in a happy Utopia, as the dystopian When the Sleeper Awakes shows. The Island of Dr. Moreau is even darker. The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals vivisected (unsuccessfully) into human beings, eventually returns to England; like Gulliver on his return from the Houyhnhnms he finds himself unable to shake off the perceptions of his fellow humans as barely civilised beasts, slowly reverting back to their animal natures.