The X Prize Foundation has been reorganizing since its initial success to carry its cachet and methology into other areas of human progress:

We are now evolving the X PRIZE Foundation into a world-class prize institute to create additional radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. We are actively researching the feasibility of new prizes in space, energy, genomics, education, nanotechnology, and prizes in the social arena.

Research prizes work - and have been demonstrated to work very well, time and again. This is why I, the X Prize Foundation, and a great many other people support the MPrize for anti-aging research; if you want to get something done in a moribund and logjammed field of science - such as goal-oriented, plausible healthy life extension research - then you should start offering research prizes. Given that, it's interesting to hear that the next X Prize Foundation is to be in a core area of bioinformatics:

The X Prize Foundation, the group behind the $10 million prize for human space flight, 'plans to offer a $5 million to $20 million prize to the first team that completely decodes the DNA of 100 or more people in a matter of weeks, according to foundation officials and others involved,' the Wall Street Journal reports.

The obvious goal here is to kick-start the era of personalized medicine by accelerating existing trends in falling costs and increasing reliability of sequencing technologies. Given the present state of the art, however, this one might get awarded considerably sooner than expected. I suspect there is a more subtle agenda at work; a great deal of technology supports and surrounds the work of sequencing. It's a lynchpin at the heart of biotechnology. Faster, cheaper DNA sequencing will have similar broad enabling effects to the advent of faster, cheaper computers - all sorts of world-changing applications and business plans come out of the woodwork when the cost falls. The world is chock full of ideas waiting to happen just as soon as the startup cost is low enough.

The golden future of biotechnology - and by extension, longevity medicine - rests on making all the enabling technologies, the basic infrastructure, as cheap, widespread and reliable as possible. Onwards to a future of garage biotechnology and open source medical research!

Technorati tags: biotechnology, life extension, research prizes