29 THE WAR ON AGING SPECULATIONS ON SOME FUTURE CHAPTERS IN THE NEVER-ENDING STORY OF HUMAN LIFE EXTENSION Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D. Until the 1800’s, over a quarter of those born, even in wealthy nations, died before their first birthday and a huge number of women died in childbirth. The great French doctor Louis Pasteur can therefore be credited without much argument as the person who has extended more lives by more years than anyone in history, by virtue of his introduction of the germ theory  and  the  consequent  appreciation  of  the  importance of hygiene in medical care and, subsequently, of the power of antibiotics. [1] (Had the medical establishment been less robust in their suppression of new ideas, Pasteur would have been preceded by over a decade by Ignaz Semmelweis [2]; I  return  to  this  point  towards  the  end  of  this  essay.)  This insight resulted, in the industrialized world, in a reduction by an order of magnitude in infant mortality over a period of a few decades. [3] It would doubtless have arrived eventually, but we have no idea how long it might have been delayed had Pasteur not existed. If we guess at a ten-year delay, which is less than what Semmelweis’s suppression caused, we can conclude that tens of millions of people who would have died