Ageing is malleable
Alexey Strygin works at Gero (Gero.ai), a company that does something audacious: it uses modern physics and AI to look past the famous “hallmarks of ageing” and find the most upstream mechanism of ageing itself — and then to target it, to slow or stop the process at its root. Staffed mostly by AI engineers and physicists, Gero works on two fronts at once: ageing drugs and the ageing biomarkers needed to measure whether they work. Alexey leads the biomarker side.
He sits firmly in Radical Life Extension — and he’s refreshingly direct about it. “I want to live indefinitely. I don’t want to die. Death is stupid.” His point isn’t recklessness; it’s that a healthy human with a fit body and hundreds of years of experience could do extraordinary things. Imagine, he says, another ten years for the smartest minds in history — “we’d have been on Mars already.”
Alexey argues the biggest barrier isn’t the science but the culture of accepting death — a coping mechanism from an era when we could do nothing about it. Now that the technology is “promising enough,” he wants us to pour resources, people and attention into it, because he considers it the single most important technology for humanity today.
And he practises what he preaches. A daily 20–30-minute yoga and bodyweight routine he’s refined for a decade (“even if I only have five minutes, and I always have five minutes”), no alcohol, mostly-clean eating, and a set of clever tricks to blunt the damage from his one weakness — sugar (quercetin, dessert only after greens and a proper meal, splitting portions, choosing dried cherries).
