As Jay Fox notes, the Mprize for anti-aging medicine is making great progress. The prize exists to promote scientific research in the field of rejuvenation and longevity medicine - scientists are close to being able to make large gains in both mouse and human healthy life span, but this can only happen with much greater levels of funding and public support.

The first item of news, which happened to little fanfare so far, unfortunately, is that the Mprize recently celebrated its 50th member of The Three Hundred. In fact, as of now, there are 52 members of the 300, representing 1.3 million dollars in long-term commitments towards the prize. It doesn't sound like much, but when I first became aware of the Mprize, about 13 months ago, there were only 13 members, one fourth of the number today, representing only $325,000 in long-term commitments. So the prize has grown very rapidly in the last 13 months.

More importantly, 13 months ago the Mprize had only collected about $60,000 in cash so far, give or take. Thanks to a roughly $3,000 donation by a very special person, the Mprize just broke the $150,000 mark in cash collected.

Amongst these donors are famous names and organizations, such as Ray Kurzweil, William Haseltine of Human Genome Sciences, the X Prize Foundation, the Foresight Foundation, and others - but the important contributions come from everyday folks like you and I, demonstrating that there is broad support for progress towards healthy life extension medicine.

As you may know if you've been reading the Longevity Meme daily news, the next Mprize event kicks off this coming Tuesday 5th - an auction for a celebrity lunch with Ray Kurzweil, all the proceeds going to the Mprize fund. Round up six friends, pool your money and make a bid when the auction goes live!

Posted by Reason at July 3, 2005 11:34 AM | TrackBack (1)