In 2005, for his TED talk, Dr. Aubrey de Grey was asked by an audience member who was seemingly puzzled by his long brown beard, “Since you talk about aging and try to defeat it, why do you make yourself appear like an old man?”

De Grey responded, “Because I am an old man. I am 158.”

Aubrey de Grey

It has been three years since then and at the ripe age of 161 (according to his Wikipedia bio, his birthday is in April), Aubrey de Grey presided over the latest of the Methuselah Foundation’s annual anti-aging symposiums. At the end of June 2008, a group of us with ties to Autoimmunity Research Foundation attended that meeting on the *very* sunny campus of UCLA. Our goal was to get researchers thinking about a bacterial explanation for diseases of the aging, and to get them to begin considering the Marshall Protocol as an anti-aging option.

Aubrey de Grey is always surrounded by people, be they prestigious presenters, researchers, conference organizers, or any of his small army of energized volunteers for which he plays field marshall.

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This is a video of the presentation made by Prof Trevor Marshall at the Aging conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, on June 29, 2008.

For those who have access to a high-speed internet connection and fast computer, better version of this video, in High Definition is . Also available: the related abstract and Conference details.

“I’m sixty going on sixteen.” “I think that at the moment my brain functions even better than it did when I graduated from college 50 years ago.” “I’m convinced that I will live longer because I’m doing the Marshall Protocol.” Comments like these – which were made by actual patients in the MP phase II study trial – are increasingly common as people reach the later stages of the treatment. In fact, many Marshall Protocol patients who have recovered from inflammatory conditions, such as sarcoidosis, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and others report that recovery feels like “being 20 years younger.”

The wear and tear created by the inflammatory response plays a large role in generating the stress and tissue damage that leads to old age.

In a 2006 paper in the Journal of Immunity and Aging, Italian researcher Sergio Giunta argues that inflammation and aging are intricately connected, to the point where the term “Inflammaging” has been coined “to explain the now widely accepted phenomenon that ageing is accompanied by a low-grade chronic, systemic up-regulation of the inflammatory response and that the underlying inflammatory changes are also common to most age-associated diseases.”

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