Fight Aging!

Some numbers to consider, since everyone and their dog seems to be talking about the disposition of inordinately large sums of money - and little else - at the moment:

• Between 1970 and 2000, increasing life expectancy added $3.2 trillion per year in effective wealth.
• The yearly cost of natural death: more than 50 million lives and $100 trillion in wealth.
• The estimated cost of developing robust rejuvenation in mice via SENS, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence: $100 million per year over ten years.
• The 2010 budget for the US National Institute on Aging: $1 billion.
• The 2010 budget for the US National Institutes of Health: in the vicinity of $35 billion.
• The NIH comprises perhaps a third of medical research funding in the US.
• The cost of acquiring sirtuin research company Sirtris: $720 million.

• The 2010 research budget at the SENS Foundation: a little over $650,000.

We all have our ideas as to how to spend money in ways better than the choices made by its current owner. It can be frustrating when the course ahead is so very clear indeed, yet not taken ... but that is what advocacy is for. When you have a vision, share it, persuade others, and make it happen. When you don't like the numbers you see in front of you, work to change them.