I gave a nod of thanks to the first 87 members of The Three Hundred in the latest Longevity Meme Newsletter:

Eighty-seven people have so far chosen to join The Three Hundred, generous supporters of the Methuselah Foundation and mostly folk of quite modest means. As taxes come and go in the US again, I think it's worth pointing out that The Three Hundred help to keep the foundation within the arcane boundaries of 501(c)3 nonprofit status as the larger donations mount.

While we all have our varying opinions on taxes and regulation - and I'm sure you know mine by now - I think that any excuse is a good excuse to point out just how much the Three Hundred are contributing to the future of meaningful anti-aging research and healthy life extension advocacy. I strongly suggest that you consider joining: where else can you leverage so much positive change for the future of health and longevity from a couple of dollars a day?

MPrize supporter Eric Boyd emailed me today with a positive step forward:

I have been trying to get up my dedication to join The 300, but it's a lot of money. I gave a little last year. In order to motivate/bind myself to join The 300 I have created a pledge:

http://www.pledgebank.com/Mprize300

With promotion on your blog I am sure that we can acheive this pledge. Help me cure aging!

I confess that I have not been following the development of Web 2.0-style philanthropic and nonprofit tools like PledgeBank as closely as I should, but this is an excellent utilization. A pledge of support for the MPrize for anti-aging research is exactly the sort of thing these services can help to enable.

So, you there in the audience, the folk who have been thinking about stepping up to make a real difference to the future of health and longevity - how about proving Eric right?

I will become a member of "The 300" at Mprize.org but only if 20 other people will too.

...

The 300 is a group of people supporting an anti-aging prize fund. Each member donates $1000/year to the prize. If 20 people signed up, that would add half a million dollars to the prize over the next 25 years, enough to make the prize significantly more attractive to researchers. Join me and help us cure aging!

$1,000 per year is a cup of coffee a day - many people of modest means lose more than that to careless finance or candy. These early years, in which advocacy is just as important as science, are a unique opportunity to leverage small amounts of money into world-changing progress. You can invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime of work, giving you comparatively good health and medical care in old age - but all that will come to naught if you haven't also invested in ensuring a future that includes working healthy life extension technologies. Suffering, aging and dying with a large 401k is still suffering, aging and dying; wealth cannot buy medical sevices that failed to come into being for lack of support.

Advocacy by organizations like the Methuselah Foundation and associated groups has had a large effect in just the past few years. You don't have to look back very far to see that a few advocates - with a few dollars, donated by people just like you and I - have engineered a sea change in the way the media and the scientific mainstream view and talk about healthy life extension.

You can help make this process even faster and more effective: sign Eric's pledge and join The Three Hundred.

Technorati tags: advocacy, activism, life extension

Posted by Reason at March 27, 2006 10:15 PM | TrackBack (0)