Take a Look at the New Organ Mprize Site

You folk should take the time to look over the recently launched New Organ Mprize website. It's an attractive initiative of the Methuselah Foundation, and you'll find a fair amount of motivational content there on the subject of growing complex organs for transplant:

Imagine a future where no one has to suffer and die while waiting for an organ that never arrives. New Organ funds that future. With your help, everyone who needs an organ can have one custom made for them from their own cells.

A crowd funded prize to award the team that creates the first complex organ - heart, lung, pancreas, liver, or kidney - from a person's cells.

Banking: Preserve a complex organ for 30 days. Thousands die because the best we can do is less than a day.

Engineering: Build a complex whole organ from a person's cells, transplant it, and have it function for two years.

If you support these goals, then I note that there is currently a matching fund for donations: a pledge drive to raise the first $200,000 by the end of March. They have raised more than $45,000 in pledges this year - so do your part and help! In a world in which a Kickstarter project can pull in a million dollars for an iPhone widget, I'd like to think that it's also possible to rapidly raise a few hundred thousand dollars for a cause that actually matters.

As we walk the road of life, ever more set upon by subtle decay and damage along the way, our health and remaining life expectancy becomes ever more dependent on the state of medical technology. It would be good to wake up twenty years from now knowing that you had made a reasonable contribution in those past decades towards helping ensure your own life and health. When we get to the point in old age at which we need, as a matter of life and death, futuristic tissue engineering and regenerative medicine that can rebuild us from the inside, we'll only have ourselves to blame if it is not yet developed and deployed. The course ahead for the science of human rejuvenation and regeneration is very clear, and whether or not it happens is largely a matter of money and will - how many people are persuaded to work on it, and how greatly are they funded.

So do your part to help! It's not as though you have anything to lose.

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