De Grey does have a PhD in the relevant life science, does run a lab (but the lack of one would not a valid criticism of anything), and was not fired from any job, but quit after a disagreement. I know him personally and I can assure you that whatever else he may be, he is not a charlatan.

As for being white (which I am), I hate the constant stereotyping and the subtle anti-white racism in the UK that has flourished under our oppressive left-wing state. Many organisations now have clear policies in place to favour/advantage people who are non-male, and non-white (and often non-middle class). Social engineering is so pervasive in our society that summarily to write off Paxman’s non-conformist remarks as a faux pas shows precisely the extent to which dictat has, in many quarters, displaced independent critical thought.

As to the documentary’s thesis that de Gray is doing all this work to “fill a void in his life” – again, so what? This is like criticizing Godel because he went crazy and stopped eating because he though he was being poisoned.

What difference does any of this make? The guy is trying to end aging. He’s mobilizing resources in that direction and making things happen.

The next time you go to a rest home or a hospital and see all the human suffering maybe you better think about the good he’s trying to do and decide whose side you’re on.

The SENS Challenge Prize

In July 2005, Pontin announced a $20,000 prize open to any molecular biologist, with a record of publication in biogerontology, who could prove that SENS was “so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate.” (See Pontin’s TR Blog “The SENS Challenge” [6]). Technology Review pledged $10,000 towards the prize, and the Methuselah Foundation, an organization co-founded by de Grey, pledged the other $10,000.

In March, of 2006, Technology Review announced that it had chosen a panel of judges for the Challenge: Rodney Brooks, PhD, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); Anita Goel, MD and PhD, founder and chief executive of Nanobiosym; Vikram Kumar, MD, cofounder and chief executive of Dimagi, and a pathologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston; Nathan Myhrvold, PhD, cofounder and chief executive of Intellectual Ventures, and former chief technologist at Microsoft; and J. Craig Venter, PhD, founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute and developer of whole-genome shotgun sequencing, which sped up the human genome project.[7]

Technology Review received five submissions to its Challenge. Three met the terms of the prize competition. They were published by Technology Review on June 9, 2006. Accompanying the three submissions were rebuttals by de Grey, and counter-responses to de Grey’s rebuttals.

On July 11, 2006, Technology Review published the results of the SENS Challenge. In the end, no one won the $20,000 prize. The judges felt that no submission met the criterion of the challenge and disproved SENS, although they unanimously agreed that one submission, by Preston Estep and his colleagues, was the most eloquent. Craig Venter succinctly expressed the prevailing opinion: “Estep et al. … have not demonstrated that SENS is unworthy of discussion, but the proponents of SENS have not made a compelling case for it.”

Summarizing the judges’ deliberations, Pontin wrote, “SENS is highly speculative. Many of its proposals have not been reproduced, nor could they be reproduced with today’s scientific knowledge and technology. Echoing Myhrvold, we might charitably say that de Grey’s proposals exist in a kind of antechamber of science, where they wait (possibly in vain) for independent verification. SENS does not compel the assent of many knowledgeable scientists; but neither is it demonstrably wrong.”[8] However, Myhrvold himself was later quoted in the Washington Post (November 1, 2007, page C10) as follows: “It was a bit ironic because they were mostly the work of established scientists in mainstream gerontology who sought to brand de Grey as ‘unscientific’ — yet the supposed refutations were themselves quite unscientific. “The ‘refutations’ were either ad hominem attacks on de Grey, or arguments that his ideas would never work (which might be right, but that is what experiments are for), or arguments that portions of de Grey’s work rested on other people’s ideas. None of these refute the possibility that he is at least partially correct.”

Taken from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Grey_Technology_Review_debate

Being forced to pay taxes for others benefits is oppressive. Whether it is health care or public transportation, if you do not use it why should you have to pay for it other than the government forces you to pay for it?