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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.
I am definitely buying one of those immortal mice to my daughter. That should teach her a valuable lesson about life.
Full Tilt
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.
Funding research motivates a single lab. Offering a prize motivates all of them.
For good or ill stupid little trophies presented at awards ceremonies is a motivator for most people. The prize looks like a lot of money, but really, compared to what you'll likely have to spend to collect it it's just a stupid little trophy.
KFG
I agree. I don't want to live an unnaturally long life, but I _would_ like to see the future...
So the day it's possible to cryogenically freeze people, I'm in.
Imagine being frozen for 50 years, then brought back so you could see the world for 1 year, then frozen for another 50, and so on until your natural death. You could witness the world thousands of years from now.
THAT would be great.
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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?
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.
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There's a painting of his cousin, Dorian Gray in his attic.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .