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."

Comments

Immortal

[Seumas]

There will never be a discovery (publically at least) of indefinitely life-extending consequence. There will, however, be discoveries that prolong life. But not too much at a time.

If you figure out a way to make people life forever or at least a very long time, you can only make them pay for it once. If you discover a way to make people live an extra decade, they'll pay through the nose for it, eventually die, move on and you'll have a new generation of customers.

It's just like medications and diseases. It's not in the interest of commercialized medicine to research and discover CURES. It's in their interest to research and discover medications that make living with a disease tolerable or prolong your life with the disease rather than eradicate it.

Re:Immortal

[kasparov]

Um... if people live forever, it doesn't mean that new people wouldn't be born who would need to obtain the 'immortality serum'. Birth rates would probably slow, but not stop. (And don't give me the overpopulation angle, necessity is the mother of invention.

But frankly, the people interested in helping people live forever probably aren't that concerened with doing it for profit in the first place. (And if you have ever seen a picture of Aubrey de Grey you will understand what I'm talking about.)

Don't discount non-commercialized medicine/research for eventually finding the 'cure for aging'. Who would have thought that someone would release a 'free' enterprise-grade operating system when they could actually charge for it indefinitely with upgrades and service packs.

Re:Immortal

[dshannon]

Sorry, but you just miss a major point - if someone manufactures a pill, taken once daily, that make you live *forever*, then that's an awful lot of pills a day we're all (many of us at least) going to be paying for, *forever*, ergo a lot of moolah to be made. A single-shot serum seems as ridiculous as all those 'fountain of eternal youth' movies.

Are you joking?

[Mercury2k]

Wow, only 1million bucks to the person who cures natural death? No wonder why nobody is in a rush. You can make more money engineering bio weapons for the states. ;p

Re:Are you joking?

[DaemanUhr]

...to the person who cures natural death?

The prize is for curing aging, and curing natural death is not the same thing.

Not that there's not a strong correlation, but 10-year-olds die of natural causes too. It's just that old people are just a hell of a lot more prone to die of natural causes. If we can make old people more like young people, they'll still die, but just far less often.

Wow, only 1million bucks to the person who cures natural death? No wonder why nobody is in a rush. You can make more money engineering bio weapons for the states.

The X Prize was only $10 million, yet the space tourism industry promises to be a multi-billion dollar industry in the near future. No wonder no one wanted to compete for it... Oh wait, they had at least 27 competitors, and most of them signed up before the X Prize had collected even "1million bucks".

The M Prize continues to grow rapidly. It had reached $500,000 barely five months ago! Even if the prize grows linearly (unlikely, since it's currently growing at least quadratically), that means the prize will break $10 million in just 90 more months, or 7.5 years.

However, assuming it continues its quadratic growth rate, the M Prize should reach over $10 million well before 2010! And that's assuming that another Ansari doesn't step forward and boost the prize up to where it probably needs to be, between $50 million and $100 million.

Sure, it's only $1 million today, but that number will continue to grow rapidly as people donate to the prize and try to break the death meme that holds sway over society today.

It's for mice, not humans.

[Chemisor]

I don't know about you, but if I discovered immortality, I certainly wouldn't tell anyone. Just imagine all those stupid people you know, hanging around you forever! *shudder* If I keep it a secret, then I'll be sure to outlive them. Eventually.

Smart project, if you're seeking donations...

[JavaRob]

From the article:

The Methuselah Foundation has in a very short time built up a strong base of support, relying largely on donations from individuals, most of them middle class, most of them outside academia.

I'm actually not surprised that they've managed to rustle up this kind of cash from private donations so quickly. Think about it -- you've been working all your life to make a comfortable living, but now you're feeling old and are starting to think about:
1) your mortality
2) what to do with your money before you go

Introducing the perfect solution.... Not only is it a nice "I'm helping humanity" sort of cause, but you also stand a chance of pushing that deadline out a bit.

Re:Better causes

[koreth]

Besides, the only people who will benefit from this are the very rich

A conclusion you reach based on what? Plenty of medical treatments that started out expensive are widely available now.

Hell, that's true of technology in general, not just medical technology. Think about flying from New York to Shanghai on a schoolteacher's salary in the 1930s, when the term "jet set" actually referred to air travel. Should money have not been spent on the aviation infrastructure we all enjoy today, since it was just a bunch of vain bastards using it at first?

Only big companies and the military could afford early computers. UNIVAC was clearly no use to starving kids in Africa, so for the betterment of humanity we really should have put a stop to that line of research and put those scientists to work in soup kitchens instead. We'd all be so much better off now.

After all, if it benefits one rich person a decade or two before it benefits ten poor people, it should never be developed and all eleven people should suffer. Or at least that seems to be the logical result of what you're saying.

If you'd rather skip using any treatments that were initially high-priced, that is of course your prerogative.

You want to be immortal to do exactly what?

[kenaaker]

The biggest irony about human immortality is that most of the people who desperately long for immortality can't figure out what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

For myself, I think a century in good health would be more than enough.

But maybe it's not nearly the idea of immortality, as the ability to choose when you're done.

Re:You want to be immortal to do exactly what?

[some guy I know]

For myself, I think a century in good health would be more than enough.

Wait'll you hit 50.
I found it very enlightening to be on the other side of "half my life".
The older I get, the more I think that, no, one century will probably not be enough.
A millenium, maybe, but even then ...
I want to see the future.
I want to go to the stars.
There are four ways to do this:

1. Build a time machine and go to the future that way (highly unlikely).
2. Build a spacecraft whose velocity approaches that of the speed of light, so that time within it slows down, and ride that to the stars, like Ender Wiggin and his siblings (unlikely in my lifetime, if my lifetime extends only another 50-75 years).
3. Freeze myself, like Fry in Futurama (possibly).
4. Undergo medical procedures and live a lifestyle designed to increase my lifespan (most likely).

The great advantage of option 4 is that I will be able to perceive and experience the intervening years.
I think that it will be fun, for the most part.

Re:You want to be immortal to do exactly what?

[koreth]

That's a pithy quote, to be sure (though the original is slightly different) but I, for one, think there's way more stuff to see and do than I could fit into a hundred years. Hell, at the rate I'm going it'll take me nearly that long just to make it through all the books on my Amazon wishlist! Plus I can't imagine ever not wanting to live just one more year to see what happens next in the world. I have no trouble entertaining myself on a Sunday of just about any sort of weather.

That said, I agree with your last sentence. It's about choosing when you're done. If a hundred years is enough for someone, they should be able to gracefully bow out after that long.

An interesting aspect of this brave new world may be that suicide (direct or in the form of refusing medical help) is the leading cause of death.

Re:You want to be immortal to do exactly what?

[some guy I know]

If you need to watch two buildings collapse and half your life pass by to realize that you should be appreciating it more, congratulations, you've been wasting your life.

You have totally misinterpreted what I wrote.

1. The 9/11 attack didn't affect me at all, except for making me annoyed with the networks for pre-empting my normal TV shows for weeks with endless repeats of the same footage with nothing new to add, and with the FAA for the even longer lines at airports.
Oh, and I'm also annoyed with congress and Bush for using it as an excuse for ramming through all of that unconstitutional civil rights-robbing legislation, and the war in Iraq, and, ...
OK, 9/11 did affect me, but not in the "life-affirming" sense.
I mean, more people die each year on our nation's highways than did in the 9/11 attack.

2. I have always wanted to live a good life.
It's just that, when I was younger, I thought that 100 years or so would be enough.
Now that I am closer to 100, I believe otherwise.

When I was 18, I didn't expect to live past age 30.
I fully expected that the USA and USSR would eventually have their nuclear war, and that almost everyone would die.
I was quite surprised, pleasantly so, that I made it to 50.

And when it is my time, whether it be tomorrow or if by some miracle I live to the ripe old age of 50, I will accept that and go without regrets and not be clamouring for an extension.

If medical science discovered a cure for your condition, wouldn't you like to live longer?
There's so much to see, so much to do.
But, if you want to give up at 50, then fine for you, if that's really what you want.
As for me, I'm not going without a fight.

Bring on...

[Schwarzchild]

the Boosterspice!!! Just think of how rich someone could get if they could live several lifetimes over.

How the prizes work

[FleaPlus]

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.

And we think social security is screwed up now!

[museumpeace]

It got that way partly because the math on which it was founded [men living to 60 if they are really lucky, women not working and popping off at 75] has been overturned by medical advances so now there's a shitload of oldsters who need a check every month.
boy would immortality or anything like it mess our society up!