Aubrey de Grey explains why he wants mice to live longer: he expects an 8–12-month gain over the four-month record to prompt scientists to put dates on treatments for aging and celebrities to persuade the public

Aubrey de Grey explains why he wants mice to live longer: he expects an 8–12-month gain over the four-month record to prompt scientists to put dates on treatments for aging and celebrities to persuade the public

On November 4, Aubrey de Grey, president of the LEV Foundation, told Honest Money LIVE that the record for extending the lifespan of middle-aged mice is about four months. His foundation aims to break that record by combining several known interventions in mice.

De Grey explains that the mouse experiments are intended to persuade scientists and the public. Mice are poor substitutes for humans: a drug that extends their lives rarely does the same in people. But mice live for about two and a half years, so results come quickly. And in his view, lifespan is the only convincing measure: health measures can look cherry-picked, whereas “people can tell a live mouse from a dead one pretty quickly.”

Calorie restriction holds the record: mice put on a restricted diet at a year and a half of age live about four months longer. According to de Grey, no better intervention has emerged in a hundred years. He argues that breaking the record will take more than one drug because, in his model, aging consists of several types of damage that accumulate largely independently. He expects the effects to add up: known interventions individually give mice an extra month or two, and together could yield 8–12 months.

The foundation’s first experiment ended in February 2025. It tested four interventions, individually and in combinations, in a thousand mice. The foundation described the outcome as a qualified success: the effects added up, but maximum lifespan did not increase substantially, and four interventions proved insufficient to meet the program’s goal. The second experiment uses eight interventions, some of which will be administered repeatedly rather than once, as in the first experiment.

One of these interventions blocks IL-11, a protein that promotes inflammation and is produced in greater amounts with age. In a study published in Nature in 2024, Stuart Cook’s group treated mice with an antibody against IL-11 starting at about 17 months of age. In both females and males, the age to which half the group survived increased by 29 weeks, nearly seven months. That is considerably more than the four months de Grey cited.

De Grey has already offered his own timeline: he puts the chances of bringing human aging under medical control within 12–15 years at fifty-fifty, meaning that people could grow older without becoming ill. He expects a new record to make his colleagues in aging biology realize that “we’re in a different universe” and begin offering timelines of their own.

He identifies the first audience for those timelines as leading global influencers who already have an interest in the subject: Joe Rogan and Kim Kardashian. Once they speak, the public will listen: Oprah Winfrey says “buy this book,” and everyone buys it. He would tell the YouTuber MrBeast that every day gained saves 110 thousand lives, his estimate of the number of people who die from aging each day.

For more than twenty years, he tried to persuade the public to fight aging:

“I tried to do it through logic, because that’s all I know: I’m a scientist. It doesn’t work. But when the world’s leading influencers say something, it works, and logic is no longer needed.”

Once the public starts demanding treatments, he expects governments to act as they did during COVID. In his account, bureaucratic rules were set aside, and vaccines became available in less than a year. His slogan is to “make aging the new COVID.”

The foundation’s documents set out the same reasoning. Alongside the scientific rationale, the page describing the first experiment gives a second one: “rhetorical, societal, political.” A foundation article anticipates that a successful program will attract global media attention and prompt politicians to allocate resources to treatments for humans.