Aubrey de Grey, a scientist who studies regenerative medicine, thinks that new biotechnology will let people who are already alive today reach the ripe old age of 1,000. "It's extraordinary to me that it's such an incendiary claim," de Grey said according to a new overview by The Week. De Grey is just one of many in Silicon Valley who are determined to expand the human lifespan as much as technologically possible, signifying a growing but still controversial field of researchers obsessed with staving off death. Basic Math For instance, The Week reports that a Korean doctor named Joon Yun has offered up two $500,000 prizes to researchers who can extend an animal's life by 50 percent by keeping its heart healthy. Yun argues that because the mortality rate for 20-year-olds is about one in a thousand, basic math predicts that someone able to maintain a healthy 20-year-old's physics indefinitely would live to be approximately 1,000 years old. De Grey and Yun are hardly outliers — The Week