Slashdot Mirror
M Prize For Anti-Aging Research Hits $1,000,000
Reason writes "William Haseltine of Human Genome Sciences (the 'father of regenerative medicine') has pushed the M Prize for anti-aging research - a project cofounded by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey and Dave Gobel - over the $1,000,000 mark in pledges. Congratulations to all involved! Read the press release here."
One point which hasn't been made here yet is how the M Prizes are actually being awarded. These aren't one-time awards -- rather, a new cash award is given out each time the previous longevity record is broken, with the amount depending on how much the old record was beaten by.
The details from this page:
Longevity Prize (LP): details
The Longevity Prize is won whenever the world record lifespan for a mouse of the species most commonly used in scientific work, Mus musculus, is exceeded.
The amount won by a winner of PP is in proportion to the size of the fund at that time, but also in proportion to the margin by which the previous record is broken. The precise formula is:
Previous record: X days
New record: X+Y days
LP fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of death of record-breaker
Winner receives: $Z x (Y/(X+Y))
Thus, hypothetically, if the new record is twice the previous one, the winner receives half the fund. If the new record is 10% more than the old one, the winner receives 1/11 of the fund. The fund can thus never be exhausted, and the incentive to break the new record remains intact indefinitely. (This is in contrast to a structure that specifies a particular mouse age whose first achiever gets the whole fund.) We believe that this is important, because the public attention will be best maintained if there is a steady stream of record-breaks, showing that scientists are taking progressively better control of the aging process.
The record-breaker will receive prize money every week from the point where they beat the previous record. The amount paid each week will be as if their mouse had just died; the total amount won so far by a living record-breaker will be prominently displayed on the web site.
Rejuvenation Prize (RP): details
The Rejuvenation Prize rewards successful late-onset interventions. There are many ways to structure a prize to achieve this goal. The Rejuvenation Prize has been instituted (in replacement of the Reversal Prize -- see above) so as to satisfy two additional shortcomings of the Longevity Prize: first, that it is of limited scientific value to focus on a single mouse (a statistical outlier), and second, that the most important goal is to promote the development of interventions to restore youthful physiology, not merely to extend life. Thus, the Rejuvenation Prize rules are as follows:
1) The Rejuvenation Prize is awarded not for an individual mouse but for a published study. The study must satisfy the following criteria:
- The treated and control groups must have been at least 20 mice each.
- The intervention must have been begun at an age at least half of the eventual mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the CONTROL group.
- The treated mice must have been assessed for at least five different markers that change significantly with age in the controls, and there must be a statistically significant reversal in the trajectory of those five markers in the treated mice at some (unrestricted) time after treatment began versus some (also unrestricted) time before it began. (It is OK if other markers do not show this.)
2) The record that a new prizewinner has to beat should be the mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the treated group.
Conveniently, the Rejuvenation Prize does not require the same rigorous validation procedures as the Longevity Prize, because the age involved is defined to be that reported in the publication of the study.