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Paypal Co-Founder Backs Anti-Aging Research Prize
Baldrson writes, "Anti-aging researchers, via The Methuselah Mouse Prize or M-Prize, are receiving an additional $3 million incentive to stop and reverse aging. Researchers win M-Prize money in increments by breaking longevity records for mice or reversing their aging. The philanthropic donation comes from Peter Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of PayPal. Mr. Thiel has pledged to match each dollar donated to the M-Prize with his own 50 cent contributions up to $3 million." The M-Prize was created by Aubrey de Grey, a controversial biomedical gerontologist in Cambridge, England.
Pay the money to people with a family history of long lifespans if they breed with other qualifiers. Even if this prize leads to mice with long lifespans it may not deliver usable insights into human ageing
http://michaelsmith.id.au
How much did the guy inventing the serial to USB converter get for expanding a mouse's lifespan?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You get to the age of 300, while still looking 21, and then someone initiates a chargeback.
Instant death.
I am definitely buying one of those immortal mice to my daughter. That should teach her a valuable lesson about life.
Full Tilt
I would think the idea of 'not dying' for as long as possible would be a sufficient motivator. Perhaps he should just fund the research instead.
I recollect reading in atleast 1 book of Richard Dawkins (not sure which), that ageing was evolutionarily inevitable.
The reason being that parasitic genes in a host that usually end up killing or harming it will quickly be removed from the gene pool. So such genes are not evolutionarily successful.
On the other hand, if their effect was triggered only after a certain number of years (when an animal has already performed its main purpose of reproduction), there is no drive for it to be removed from the gene pool. An animal with the parasite would be as successful in spreading its genes as one without it. So over the years, the early-acting bad stuff has been wiped out bit by bit by natural selection, while the latent ones have been accumulating all along.
I'm sure someone with more knowledge in this will chip in.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Even with our "short" life spans now, people commit suicide, engage in risky sexual practices, talk on the cell phones while driving, eat fettucine alfredo, etc, etc. What indication is there for a great public need for extended lifetimes? All this will mean is more work. Retirement at 85 until you can get SS benefits? No thank you. Lifespan is pretty ok right now. We need better quality, not quantity of life.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
leave the research alone; we're not meant to live forever by nature!
we would run out of new and interesting porn to check out!
and what are we suppose to do with all these people?
Has anyone thought of the financial / political repercussions of this?
If people can live until they are 150 years old what are we going to do about pensions? Raise it to 100 years old? What happens to people who can't afford anti-aging medication? Do they not ever reach pension age?
Will healthcare pay for anti-aging treatment?
I'd prefer to donate to cybernetics systems, replacing your old parts with electronic parts are a lot more "natural" form of human evolution.
It was supposed to be part of the standard y2k package along with my jetpack, hover car, and virtual reality system.
If everyone was doing this, who would be sitting around doing the things neccessary to make anything happen?
Popping in and out for a few years could catch on though... call it "LifeShare".
"What's that Sir? No, it's nothing like a timeshare. Only $50,000 and you'll get this book of excellent vouchers worth much more in the future (*actual value may fluctuate with market forces). Sign here. Thankyou for your custom."
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
...take cuttings to rejuvenate stock and throw the old plant away
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Bill Gates - genuinely philanthropic - his ego might like the fact that he is the man that's saving the world, but at least he's saving other people.
The paypal guy has just looked in the mirror, realised he's getting older, and wants to live longer. He's worked out that if a few days' coding, some neat financial agreements and a bit of luck can make hundreds of millions of dollars; perhaps a few million dollars and some injecting of mice can lead to him living forever. The guy is more Frankenstien than philanthropist.
Job done.
They're about something far more important. Social status. The winner of a prize gets to say "look at me, I'm better than everyone else". It's all about fitness to breed and sexual selection. The drive to win these prizes is built in.
Deleted
The guy's money is his to do as he likes, of course, but how about funding research into diseases that affect people at a young age - heart disease, obesity, depression - instead of keeping people alive longer than nature intends?
First Google with its "profit-making charity"... in my day they were called "venture capitalist firms" or, if not entirely unreasonable, "angel investors", but never "charities"! Now donating money for research into reversing the ageing process in mice, or putting it through the spin-dryer "gratuitous animal experimentation to defy mortality", is considered philanthropic.
Bill Gates is philanthropic when he gives money for vaccination programmes. Capone's soup kitchen was philanthropy. Neither a wealthy man's likeability nor his PR machine define whether he has performed a charitable act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_self-inte rest
Deleted
First most influential lobby in US is American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)
Those people are lobbying for wasting our money on the research that will make 70 years old people live longer (Alzheimer desease being the most ourtragious example) instead of spending it for the cause of deseases that devaste less fortunate of us. The rich want to live longer too.
It is important to have respect to older people and provide them good care by their kids, but have a sense of balance, people!
This is not philantropy, this is investment.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
What would we do about our pensions if we all lived longer? Change them.
Deleted
Young people tend to spend more money on high-tech toys.
:)
Paypal lets you buy them.
Keep everyone 21 forever and his market share goes through the roof.
...welcome our new ever-younger Highlander mice overlords.
Man, I'm from India. If everyone starts living till they're 100 and stuff, we'll run out of space to stand.
And of course, you will pay for the costs of freezing yourself, and maintaining the equipment, how, exactly?
More than likely, it will be much like a couple of SF stories by different authors - the section of Larry Niven's "The Long A.R.M. of Gil Hamilton" wherein a law allowing corpsicles to be thawed and broken up for parts is being considered.
However, I like a short story I read many years ago - a man has himself frozen, and is awakened. He wakes to find another, older man next to his bed. They strike up a conversation about what has changed - the young man asks about the older man's earrings, which he is informed are antenna. He is then told he is being prepped for heart surgery. "But I don't have a bad heart" the young man says. "No, but I do" says the older man.
www.eFax.com are spammers
As well as the obvious don't mess with nature bits, I wonder if anyone out there will be thinking "Oh no, more wait until I get to heaven" or "On no, more wait until I reincarnate somewhere better"? ;-)
:-)
I think the reincarnators get it easier as death is just a minor inconvenience in a spiritual lifespan that lasts a long time. Still, when you've just got settled into a body, got it into shape if you're a yogi or yogini, and are enjoying it. Maybe the next one will be somewhere where you have spiritual practice from the start.
For the heaven/hell lot - is it a question? Will I get to heaven or not? Have I been good enough? Can I prolong waiting to find out?
Then again, at the end of their lives, how many old people have had their innings and are happy to go and how many hold on? I wonder how many are so firm in their beliefs aboout what's going to happen next.
As for the pronounciation of Vitamin (from the loving the Brits department) - It's Vit-A-Min, not Vite-A-Min!
Li Qing Yuen, who was said to have consumed wolfberries daily, lived to the age of 252 years (1678-1930).
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
Nature could care less if we live or die. We are the only species in the universe that we know of that can determine its future. That is a power that we should not squander. The Earth is billions of years old, if a single human could live for even 500 years, it would be but a drop in the bucket. Some trees live for 1000 years you know, do you think that pisses of Nature too?
On humans
There are myriad social an economic issues that fall from this (like having to get government authorization to reproduce in order to control population for example) but let's leave those alone for now.
What about body part wearing out? Broken bones, worn out teeth, other injuries that, given hundreds of years, are bound to happen?
It seems to me that success in this field will necessarily create a need for engineering effective replacement body parts. Sounds like an interesting premise for a Sci-Fi novel that I'm pretty sure somebody here is going to tell me has already been written.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
. . . function in the top percentiles at anything I turn my hand/brain to . . .
I function in the lower percentiles at spelling and penmenship.
I learned to touch type at a very young age as one of my coping mechanisms, but it results in some rather odd mirror oeuevh phenomena.
KFG
...and the related SENS effort, ideally _before_ ranting. :)
All here discussed counter-arguments and more, have been dealt with here:
http://www.sens.org/concerns.htm
(Well except for the non-infinite porn supply during eternity, perhaps.)
The -very interesting and diverse- reasons why both projects are carried out:
http://www.sens.org/ENSdef.htm
First off, you don't have to get the treatment(s) if you'll really decide
don't want to, whenever available. If you try to look at the arguments
behind the links without bias, here is one thing, you might realize from it:
This IS also about improving quality of life along the way, by increasingly
minimizing most serious degenerative diseases including heart disease/obesity
at the cellular level (even without extremely healthy lifestyles), that are
so much cause of suffering and inefficiencies in our society. So this definitely
will do the public a lot of good. It's about indefinite postponement of morbidity
from degenerative disease; I know one of the SENS researchers: many seriously ill,
but not old, people (heart disease, cancer, autoimmune) are also waiting for very
first successes of the studies. The MPrize goal of sustained life extension does
inevitably include mitigation of degenerative diseases in the long-term.
We currently live in a world which is becomming overcroweded, yet birthrates are not going down, and due to "Free Will", they probably wont. If you extend the average lifespan of a human, even if only by a few years, it's going to cause more problems than solve. If you're going to start extending lifespans, the issues of homelessness and cramped / crowded cities need to be addressed first as well as accomodation to accomodate for the sudden decrease in death rates. Eventually, yes, everything will level out again when people begin to start dying again, but during the time from start to end, the worlds population will increase by a LARGE percentage, which will undoubtedly eventually come back to bite us in the ass. Don't mess with nature, these things happen for a reason.
In our history, changes good or bad, have come when people in high positions have died. We all know which people will benefit from "imortallity", the rich and powerful.
I don't like the idea of dictators living for 200 years...
..how the icon is that of a really old man whose brain is preserved in a jar.
I love humanity, it is people I hate
Pathetic. An incentive to torture other living creatures because someone can't accept the inevitable.
Now if we cross breed these mice with those happy mice... Everlasting fun?
Biomarker research in mice has already established that metformin is the most powerful 'off the shelf' anti-aging agent. Given that metaformin is for diabetics, the research challenge now is to determine how drugs like it can be safely ingested by the healthy.
I have never heard this, but it does make a certain amount of sense; mice certainly have no reason to be as 'optimized' for longevity as humans are.
Perhaps if we looked at animals that are more human-like in terms of reproductive strategies, we'd see some better optimizations than even we have?
I'm thinking particularly about whales; many species have only one chance at reproducing per season, due to their migration patterns, and have 12-month or longer gestations. I'm not sure how long infant whales take before they split from their mothers, but I'm betting it's significant as well. Perhaps not long enough to encourage inter-generational "families," but not the quick turnaround of animals that have litters.
Perhaps our choice of study animals is causing us to think we're making progress, when in reality we're only imitating what evolution has already done for us? Not that this is all bad, undoubtedly we'll learn lots in the process.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If we really wish to grow that old, I have more faith in prohibiting people from having children before they are at age X. Set this age to 40, and many people will not be able to have children today. Increase X incrementially through generations, in order to make sure that only the ones that live long enough to reproduce will survive. Longer lives should arise. It's quite inhumane, though.
I've already got it all sorted out.
I'll work till I'm 67, retire in poverty, and (based on my family's male longevity) die 4 years later.
The last thing I need is some breakthrough that will keep me hanging around after that.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I would assume that the tradeoff for being frozen and living forever would be mandatory sterilization; if you want to live forever, then there's no need for you to have children.
I could imagine some point at which our understanding of neuroscience and neurology improves to the point where a living human brain could be transplanted from one body to another, or its contents uploaded to a new wetware container. Thus, you could have yourself repeatedly cloned and preserve your consiousness across the ages, barring accidental death. In that case, you have to look at your clones as being effectively your "children," only with your personality.
Alternately, if you decide to have children naturally, you can look at it as alternative to cloning, where you simply mix the genetic material up with somebody else's, and then don't do any of the personality or brain-transfer stuff.
Obviously allowing people to do both -- live for arbitrarily long periods and have children -- would be a recipe for disaster, unless humanity was in the process of expanding its territory. However I think people at some point could be offered the choice of extending themselves directly, or via their children.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There, that's better.
I can't see how living for 50 years as a 70-year-old will help anyone
I can. Right now, when you think of "living...as a 70-year-old," you think of someone who may not be totally independent, or whose mental and physical faculties are dimished. In short, someone who is probably a burden to society, taking the social equivalent of a 'desk by the window' while they live out their time.
Except that even now, that's not true (heck, I know people who are still razor sharp and running marathons at 70), and future advances in medical technology will mean it's even less so. The goal of anti-aging research isn't to just let people live longer -- making that period of elderly dotage longer -- but to make a person's middle age, their productive years, longer. In short, to give people more useful life.
So at some point, I could easily see where someone could live as a 70-year-old and be a great benefit to society. They would have 70 years of learning and experience behind them, but still have the physical and mental acumen that we now associate with a 30 or 40-year-old. Those people could and would be, productive members of society. More than that, even; they would be vast repositories of experience, having lived through nearly twice what an average worker of today has probably seen.
In a world that seems to be obsessed with the short term, I could see us benefiting greatly from advances that allow people who've been around for a century or more to still be active participants in decisionmaking.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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This is certainly a risk, but it's not an unmanageable one.
Over arbitrarily long periods, periods where an investment would have been un-profitable are exceptions rather than the rule. A well-diversified portfolio would not be at great risk of bankruptcy, barring some sort of catastrophic civilizational collapse (the sort of thing that would probably entail physical disruption of the sleeping folks anyway).
Even if you woke up in the next century's equivalent of the Great Depression, properly invested assets (including foreign currencies, real property, and precious metals and commodities) could probably give you a guarantee of at least enough funds to get on your feet. Or alternately, provide enough of an income stream to allow you to just go back to sleep for another 50 years: I have heard it said that even considering the Great Depression, the U.S. securities market has been profitable over any 50 year period.
There's always the chance that the markets will just completely tank, but given our present society and the way that it looks like it's going, that's probably right up there with global thermonuclear war on the scale of catastrophic events you can't really plan for. If it happens, you'll be one of billions of penniless people.
Excepting a few drastic scenarios, I don't think it would be hard for a person with a lot of assets to invest them in 50-year "fire and forget" chunks; the key would just be conservatism and diversification. Ultimately, the risk would just be deciding how long you think society will last.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Please reference Vernor Vinge's books:
The Peace War
Marooned In Realtime
Also available in single book entitled:
Across Realtime
Instead of cryogenics, stasis fields called 'bobbles' allow 'flickering' into the future. Vinge develops this idea to the extreme and the whole story spans 50 million years. Cryogenics could serve as equivalent, with the drawbacks of maintenance of the frozen body for long periods of time.
Let's assume there are going to be all sorts of problems caused by people living to extreme old age. Even so, I'd much rather be 200 and worried about stuff than dead!
Revive the Constitution.
While living forever might sound neat, giving humans neigh immortality (excusing other causes of death) really doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Letting us live 200 years, sure, but forever? No.
The mortality rate would drop drastically, but the infant rate would keep its steady rate of increase, and then we have a massive overpopulation crisis. We would reach a point where we wouldn't be able to produce enough food to support everyone, and then more people just start dying of starvation. (What a fun way to go.)
Of course, it might be the kick needed to actually get us to colonize the moon and Mars, so maybe it's not such a bad thing in the end. It would also help with space travel as multi-year missions could be covered by the same group of people.
Well, for one thing, without our messing with nature you would probably never have been born. You owe your life to mass-produced fertilizer, industrial farm equipment, and other agricultural advances, judging from the increase in the world's population of about 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000.
You could also say that a higher population makes it more likely we'll be able to solve our problems, because there are that many more scientists working on them.
Revive the Constitution.
...the NIMH prize.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
With a rising retired population, a strained pension system, and shortages of housing and employment, do we really need people living longer?
This island's already cramped, we don't need people living another 20 years.
The best thing to do is to visit http://www.sens.org/concerns.htm
It will answer most all of these repeat questions I'm seeing posted here.
That argument doesn't work: the cost and risk of having an old organism reproduce once more is less than the cost of having offspring do it. All things being equal, it's evolutionarily better not to age.
The real reason is likely that non-age related factors used to set an upper bound on lifespans: if almost everybody gets killed before age 40, there isn't much point for human bodies to evolve to last much longer than that. The fact that we live to age 80 or 90 is a testament to how well we have evolved to avoid dying those first 40 years.
Now that starvation, disease, predation, and accidents don't kill us so much anymore, we'll be evolving longer lifespans automatically; in fact, a preference for late reproducing in the West will likely contribute to that trend.
-takeshi
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you were one of those people cheering when Dario Ringach was terrorized out of his research.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
By that time we'll have flying cars which should kill them off at a healthy rate.
Just because most people die of old age today, it does not mean most people will die of old age 100 years from now, or that humans will even exist in these numbers 100 years from now.
It's impossible to believe that with our current lifestyle, that we will all live to be 100, the world will become more and more dangerous, and life will become shorter and more brutal until we actually work to improve quality of life. Anti-Aging research improves quality of life so I support it.
There's a painting of his cousin, Dorian Gray in his attic.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I've been thinking about something for awhile and since this is sort of on topic here I'll pose the question.
Are shorter lifespans favored in natural selection?
Some of the information I've looked at tells of dinosaurs living to be a well over 100 years old and many reptiles alive today have very prolonged life spans compared to mammals. Also when you take into account some of the mechanisms that cause "aging," it leaves me wondering why there have been no signs of change toward extended lifespans of any mammalian species (by breeding out these mechanisms so to speak).
I have considered many possibilities why this might be and the top two I've come to are increased genepool diversity and the fact that longer lifespans would create a heavier pull on resources (food and shelter).
Hi - I represent the Methuselah Foundation, the recipient of the donation. For clarification, the donation does not go to the Mprize fund. it will be used primarily to support early stage research to repair the damage that occurs during normal metabolism in the mitochondria.
:-)
In part, the Methuselah Foundation was originally named with a tip of the hat to Heinlein
Aging causes the horrific scandal of the involuntary incarceration (nursing homes) of everyone who survives early death for no other reason than they had the bad taste to grow old. Wear can be repaired with research. Let's focus on their (soon our) needs and the contributions they could make with their collective wisdom of the ages. Was it immoral or selfish to invent vaccines that extend lifespan? Some thought so at the time...I for one am glad to have had a polio vaccine.
This effort is NOT about living forever at all - it's simply the logical extension of things like reading glasses, hearing aids, hip replacements, knee replacements, laser surgery, sanitation... only at the cellular level.
In the early 1900's families of 8 - 15 were very typical and birth control was a felony punishable by imprisonment. Because of the wretched conditions and premature deaths this caused, the movement to limit the size of families for the sake of better health, welfare and education of all was undertaken. Today, no one goes to jail for practicing birth control. Instead, those couples that decide to have 8-15 children are frowned upon. Conclusion: The world is better off by providing choices rather than unhealthy inevitabilities.
A huge concern of New Yorkers in the late 1800's was how they were going to avoid drowning and suffocating from all the horse manure. Just then, the automobile hit the scene and was hailed as a Godsend because it used environmentally friendly oil...and thus the mass extinction of New York from manure strangulation was averted. Today oil in the environmental crosshairs - and this too will be solved...and then one day that solution may be the source of a terrible crisis 100 years from now - which will be solved...and so it is going with repair of aging. Huge social and fiscal problems will be solved...and new challenges will arise - and be solved in their turn. Should those who were suffering and dying from manure pollution have been denied the cleaner oil because 100 years hence it would turn out to be a problem?
When the day comes when there's an inexpensive treatment that could shave 5 or 10 years of wear and tear from your loved ones - will you tell them it's immoral and try to stop them? Wouldn't that then be an incomprehensible - even criminal act?
One way to think of this is WHICH part of life is extended. Do we extend middle age or do we extend old age. The best plan would be to make you feel as if you were in your 40's for 30 years. the 40's is when people are most productive. the effect on society depends on which part of life is exteneded
The stigma comes from two places, one rational and one irrational.
1) It is a new medium. A lot of people have an irrational distrust of meeting people online simply because it is a new way of meeting people. In the same way people were sketched out by shopping online or distrusted cell phones, people will take some time to trust meeting online. Once meeting online achieves a critical mass, which I think it is already pretty close for younger people, this particular stigma will evaporate.
2) People lie. Humans are lie detectors. You have a disproportionately large hunk of your brain that is used for the singular purpose recognizing faces and understanding their facial expressions to see past their words. You are built to meet and read people's intentions through hundreds of subtle pieces of body language... all of which become completely useless once you are online.
People have a rational fear that people that they meet online could be blatantly lying to them. Most people will not tell big blatant lies with they are face to face with a stranger, and if they do the stranger stands a fair likelihood of detecting the lie. Online this is not the case. If I tell you the biggest lie in the world there is very little you can do just by looking at my words to see through my lie.
I can set up the biggest most hardcore hipster, show photos of me in hipster clothing and create a grand illusion about who I am with very little work. You could come meet me and find out that the my knowledge of whatever hipster music I claim to love is an inch deep, my wild stories of awesome parties are all bullshit, and my photos are doctored controlled such that you don't realize that I am a fat 14 year old boy living in my parents house, not the 24 awesome hipster I said I was living in my own crash pad in the city.
Perhaps even more then intentional deception is, there is a lot of unintentional deception. You might very well be crank out an online rant that sounds insightful and educated online when you have a few hours to work on it, but in the real world you might very well stammer your way through each sentence and freeze up if not given hours to work out your argument on paper. Your online persona might describe how you see yourself or want to see yourself, but it might be far from the real truth.
All of this said, I am not trashing meeting people online. If I ever get sick of my super hot model girlfriend from Sweden (okay, maybe she isn't from Sweden), I might give it a whirl as opposed to the alternative, which is to go the bars or cross you finger and hope for something good to come along.
I don't think that the issues with being relatively anonymous and having complete control with the information you put out will ever entirely go away. That said, I have a feeling that the superiority to the alternatives (bars, clubs, crossing your fingers) is eventually going to win out. True, the chances you getting what you want when you date online is less then perfect, but at least you know that you are getting a person that is also looking.
Additionally, technology can even solve the issue of people lying when it comes to matching services. If a matching service asks you a pile of questions, it can match you with people that are statistically likely to enjoy your company. It doesn't matter if you lie or not, it is simply matching people who answer one way with people who answer another way. You could lie on every question, but your pattern of answering could still match you up with people who like people who answer in that way.
See, this is what happens when I have too many Slashdot windows up. I post about online dating where I meant to post about aging, and I post about aging in the online dating one.
Man, I am astounded by the negativeness of the slashdot community as exhibited in the comments. We all want to live longer, healthier lives. This $3M is going to fund research which might help us do that. As such, it's a great thing!
g ing_the.html
The SENS project is an effort to fight the causes of aging, not the symptoms, such as increased chance of heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, etc. etc. As such, a primary result of SENS would be what's been called "the longevity dividend": a slowing of aging equivalent to an extra 7 years of life HALVES the rate all of these deadly diseases at any given age, resulting in trillions of dollars of savings for the medical system as a whole. In a sense, it points out the insanity of our current system, where we spend trillions fighting things after they happen but are unwilling to spend even a few million bucks on research which might delay all of those things for a least a few years, if not indefinably.
Again, I just want to say that slashdotters should be ashamed of themselves for speaking out against something which could have such hugely positive results. When your mom (grandma, uncle, etc) dies even though this type research might have saved her, then maybe you to will understand that postponing aging and death is the great moral cause of our time. We have the technology, all we need is the will!
http://fightaging.org/ http://www.sens.org/ http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2006/03/anti-a
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
De Grey is just a zealot who knows the vocabulary of science. Note that his topic is ostensibly biology, geriatrics and the biology of aging to be specific, but he talks about it as a philosophy.
There is no "reversing" or "stopping" of aging. One year from now, we'll all be a year older. If you are healthier than you were the year before, you are STILL A YEAR OLDER. If you are 65 and can run a 4-minute mile, you are NOT 25 or 35, you are simply a 65-year old who is much healthier than the AVERAGE 65-year old.
This is more than semantics. It's how the "anti-aging medicine" industry (note that there is no recognized medical board specialty in "anti-aging" the way there is in neurology, pediatrics, orthopedics, etc.) like the A4M spreads its FUD and makes its Benjamins. People are obsessed with "being younger" instead of being healthier, and they expect some snake oil to make it happen partially because these fallacies are not challenged rigorously enough in public arenas.
But note that this evangelical zeal is about "reversing aging" or "stopping aging", and "aging is a disease". Bzzt! Thanks for playing, but aging is simply a function of time. If this zeal was really about helping older people as a group be healthier than they are now, then they couldn't claim to be revolutionary, because there is plenty of research being done on healthy aging. These jackasses just want to find a way to sell snake oil in the 21st century.
[command INSERTWITTYQUIP failed: insufficient wit]
The only real constant in life is death. It doesn't matter whether you are rich, poor, stupid, smart, black, yellow or white. You get to die like anybody else. Religions are based on this fact. If you think about it, people are much more tolerant on one another because they know everyone eventually ends up in the same place. Which they perceive as final justice.
If you are to invent a way to live forever, all these will be lifted. I think it would take away all those moral barriers. That would most certainly lead to violence and war.
Holy crap! That 6502 assembler is awesome. One of my hobbies is writing C64 games... You probably already know this, but there are actually C compilers out there for the 6502 -- that's what I've been using for game coding. But, wow, really nice job on the 6502 assembler web page. Hours and hours of nostalgic entertainment. :)
Perhaps someone already brought up these clarifications, but here goes:
1. The full amount was $3.5 million, not $3 million. Thiel will be donating $500,000 in direct funds; the other $3 million is in the form of matching funds.
2. The $3.5 million will only count towards SENS research. It will not be included in the MPrize fund, which is a separate (though related) initiative. The MPrize will be awarded for creating strains of mice, or medical interventions for mice, that result in significant increases in mouse lifespan. SENS research is focussed on treating seven known contributing factors to aging. The two can go hand in hand (SENS research may produce an MPrize-winning mouse), but they are separate. Thiel's money can only be used for SENS research (conducted under the auspices of the Methuselah Foundation, the same organization that sponsors the MPrize, hence the probable basis for the confusion).
More information about SENS can be found here:
http://sens.org/