While we're still in the wake of the Longevity Dividend and the implied redirection of mainstream gerontology, I should note that The Scientist gave the Methuselah Foundation's MPrize for anti-aging research a good mention:

Interested in getting in on some big cash prizes but don't have the sequencing capacity or rocketry experience to compete in the more well known X-prize competitions? If you're good with mice, all you might need is time. In putting together the March feature on aging by S. Jay Olshansky and colleagues we came across the Methuselah Mouse Prize or M-prize. Funded by private donors, the M-prize is brainchild of Aubrey de Grey, the Cambridge geneticist who contends that with proper maintenance (yet undiscovered), humans could live for hundreds or even thousands of years. The prize is awarded in two categories that have been variously named over the years but currently go by longevity and rejuvenation.

Have you given thought to the MPrize of late? There are no doubt dollars in your life that could be put to better use, encouraging scientists to develop healthy life extension technologies soon enough to benefit folk like you and I - a big long-term return on investment if ever there was one. The latest member of The Three Hundred joined just recently, generously contributing to the future of meaningful anti-aging research - how would you like to be the next in line?

What's it worth to you to live 150 healthy years? What's it worth to you to raise the average human lifespan to 150 years, just as a start? These are not idle questions! Membership of The Three Hundred is a meaningful but affordable commitment: $1,000 a year, by the end of each year, for 25 years. This amounts to $85 a month or $2.75 a day, the equivalent of a visit to Starbucks.

The Three Hundred is a classical concept, based on a battle that saved the future of Western Civilization: Thermopylae. In 480 B.C., 300 Spartan warriors fought against incredible odds to gain time for the rest of Greece to mobilize against the Persian hordes. Without the delaying action fought at the narrow pass of Thermopylae, the achievements of Greece and our culture as we know it would have been swept away.

The Methuselah Foundation is asking you to follow in the footsteps of this noble Three Hundred, not to risk your lives, but to provide some of your treasure so that we can all live ... and live ... and live. You will help to win time for the human species to beat back an enemy far more dangerous than the ancient Persians: the Grim Reaper himself.

The Three Hundred - a group strictly limited to 300 members - will live on in history, as the Three Hundred of Thermopylae are remembered even to this day. You can be one of them. The names of the 300 Spartans who fought at Thermopylae were engraved on a stone tablet in Sparta that was still legible seven centuries later. A momument stands to this day to pay homage to their sacrifice. In lending your name to this enterprise, you will be remembered for as long as the human race survives.

The MPrize is already proving its worth, as part of the advocacy that is leading modern gerontology out of its rut and into open support for healthy life extension research. We are at a real juncture in the history of medicine; success in advocacy today will lead to greatly extended healthy life spans and the defeat of age-related frailty in the decades ahead. There is so much more that can be done, and more hands make all the difference!

Technorati tags: activism, advocacy, life extension, medical research

Posted by Reason at March 8, 2006 9:10 PM | TrackBack (0)