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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."
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Build a time machine and go to the future that way (highly unlikely).
- 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).
- Freeze myself, like Fry in Futurama (possibly).
- 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.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
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.