Someone you know could live to be 1,000 years old, according to Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge-educated biomedical gerontologist who spoke Saturday at the IdeaFestival.

“It’s just a numbers game,” de Grey told the audience in the Kentucky Center’s Bomhard Theater.

The co-author of the 2007 book “Ending Aging,” de Grey said aging is an ailment that someday could be treated through various therapies.

Even for people in good health, cells become damaged through the course of a human life, de Grey said. It’s a solvable problem, he said, by providing maintenance to damaged cells.

De Grey said the breakthrough will be finding ways to treat damaged cells, which would head off the conditions that lead to old-age deaths: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease.

The research that could lead to these techniques is further along than most people realize, de Grey said, and could begin providing therapies within the next 25 years. Or not, he added, but the possibility exists that today’s 20-somethings could be alive in 3011.

http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20110924/NEWS01/309240053/IdeaFestival-speaker-Research-could-lead-people-living-1-000-years-old