The sheer output of his pen and tongue is staggering, and every line of that bumper crop, whether intended for the most scientifically sophisticated or for the general reader, is delivered in the same linear, lucid, point-by-point style that characterizes all his writings on life prolongation. Like a skilled debater, he replies to arguments before they arise and hammers at his opposition with a forceful rhetoric that has just enough dismissiveness—and sometimes even castigation—to betray his impatience with stragglers in the march toward extreme longevity.

I should declare here that 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.

Not only does the science seem more than a little speculative, but even more speculative is the assumption on which the entire undertaking is based—namely, that it is a good thing for the men and women now populating the earth to have the means to live indefinitely.

Even my brief 15 minutes with them was sufficient to observe the softness that comes into de Grey’s otherwise determined visage when Adelaide is near, and her similar response. I suspect that his website photo was taken while he was either looking at or thinking of her.

De Grey believes that once aging has been reversed in mice, billionaires will come forward, intent on living as long as possible.

He refuses to budge a millimeter; he will not give ground to the possibility that any of the barriers to his success may prove insuperable.

If we are to be destroyed, I am now convinced that it will not be a neutral or malevolent force that will do us in, but one that is benevolent in the extreme, one whose only motivation is to improve us and better our civilization. If we are ever immolated, it will be by the efforts of well-meaning scientists who are convinced that they have our best interests at heart. We already know who they are.

Paradoxically, his 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. It is a good thing that his grand design will almost certainly not succeed.
...

...
Were it otherwise, he would surely destroy us in attempting to preserve us.

Aging is not a disease. It is the condition upon which we have been given life. The aging and eventual death of each of us is as important to the ecosystem of our planet as the changing of the seasons. When William Haseltine, Ph.D., the brilliant biotechnology entrepreneur who is the CEO of Human Genome Sciences, says, “I believe our generation is the first to be able to map a possible route to individual immortality,” we should cringe with distaste and even fear, not only at the hubris of such a statement but also at the danger it poses to the very concept of what it means to be human. The current biomedical campaign against the natural process of aging is but part of a much larger conception of humankind’s future, in which it is thought by some that parents may one day order up the IQ, complexion, and stature of their intended offspring by manipulating their DNA.

These are not the problems American medicine should be struggling with. Its proper task is not the prolongation of life beyond the naturally decreed maximum span of our species (which seems to be in the neighborhood of 120 years), but its betterment. And if anyone’s life needs betterment it is surely the elderly man or woman still living well beyond the years of vigor and productivity because the benisons of public health and biomedicine have made it possible. The percentage of the aged in our population increases with every passing year, and far too many of these people are doddering. The very gradual increase in life expectancy of previous generations has been replaced by a surge forward: the 20th century saw a 33-year gain, an astonishing figure compared to any comparable period in history. Until these recent changes, population size had the general configuration of a pyramid with a wide base of children, the top narrowing with age. It has now taken on somewhat the shape of a rectangle, as more aged individuals reach the upper levels. As disease treatment continues to improve and public health measures reach a larger segment of the population, this trend will only increase.

Heh - the editorial on the article is even worse. There is no such thing as bad publicity, however, and the blatant ad hominems and unscientific reporting give Aubrey a chance to respond.

Aubrey de Grey thinks he knows how to defeat aging. He’s brilliant, but is he nuts?

If we are to be destroyed, I am now convinced that it will not be a neutral or malevolent force that will do us in, but one that is benevolent in the extreme, one whose only motivation is to improve us and better our civilization. If we are ever immolated, it will be by the efforts of well-meaning scientists who are convinced that they have our best interests at heart. We already know who they are. They are the DNA tweakers who would enhance us by allowing parents to choose the genetic makeup of their descendants unto every succeeding generation ad infinitum, heedless of the possibility that breeding out variety may alter factors necessary for the survival of our species and the health of its relationship to every form of life on earth; they are the biogerontologists who study caloric restriction in mice and promise us the extension by 20 percent of a peculiarly nourished existence; they are those other biogerontologists who emerge from their laboratories of molecular science every evening optimistic that they have come just a bit closer to their goal of having us live much longer, downplaying the unanticipated havoc at both the cellular and societal level that might be wrought by their proposed manipulations. And finally, it is the unique and strangely alluring figure of Aubrey de Grey, who, orating, writing, and striding tirelessly through our midst with his less than fully convinced sympathizers, proclaims like the disheveled herald of a new-begotten future that our most inalienable right is to have the choice of living as long as we wish. With the passion of a single-minded zealot crusading against time, he has issued the ultimate challenge, I believe, to our entire concept of the meaning of humanness.

Pontin: But what struck me is that he is a troll. For all de Grey’s vaulting ambitions, what Sherwin Nuland saw from the outside was pathetically circumscribed. In his waking life, de Grey is the ­com­puter support to a research team; he dresses like a shabby graduate student and affects Rip Van Winkle’s beard; he has no children; he has few interests outside the science of biogeron­tology; he drinks too much beer. Although he is only 41, the signs of decay are strongly marked on his face. His ideas are trollish, too. For even if it were possible to “perturb” human biology in the way de Grey wishes, we shouldn’t do it. Immortality might be okay for de Grey, but an entire world of the same superagenarians thinking the same kinds of thoughts forever would be terrible. link

I think Pontin is sincere, but misguided by muddled thinking.  It's sad to see him attack Aubrey for having a beard and no children.