Starting November 1st: Become a SENS Patron and We'll Match a Year of Donations
The 2016 year-end SENS rejuvenation research fundraiser starts next week, on November 1st. For those who give to charitable causes at the end of the year, which turns out to be a fair number of people, this is a chance to help speed progress towards therapies that can address the root causes of degenerative aging, that can postpone and turn back age-related disease, and that can greatly extend healthy life span. This is not a pipe dream! These therapies, as well the required research and development programs, are envisaged in great detail, and the first of them are already in the earliest stages of commercial development. To all of you reading this, I ask that on November 1st you show your support for continued progress by signing up as a SENS Patron - pledge a recurring monthly donation to the SENS Research Foundation. When you do, Josh Triplett and Fight Aging! will match a full year of your donations from the challenge fund we have provided.
This is a time to focus more on longer term support rather than individual fundraisers. Over the last eighteen months, a fair number of long-term projects have started, of great importance to the future of our health and longevity. These are seeds that will take a few years - or perhaps five years - to come to fruition. To pick just a few examples: the Major Mouse Testing Program got underway with their first crowdfunding campaign; companies like Oisin Biotechnologies and UNITY Biotechnology have launched to bring to the clinic their varieties of senescent cell clearance treatment, where senescent cell accumulation is one of the seven forms of fundamental damage outlined in the SENS research agenda; Ichor Therapeutics is turning SENS Research Foundation work into a therapy for macular degeneration; the SENS Research Foundation itself launched Project|21 to target the launch of further therapies by 2021, and an initial $10 million was pledged to this goal. That isn't all. There is more going on out there in the biotechnology and advocacy communities, as new groups become involved in the quest to bring an end to the pain, suffering, and disease of aging. Continuing progress in research, as well as a growing awareness of the prospects for therapies to treat the causes of aging, are building upon one another. This is a time of transformation, in which great changes lie just ahead in the field of aging research.
None of this just happened. We helped to make this happen, all of us! For years our community has raised funds and donated to support SENS rejuvenation research efforts. We've reached out to persuade and educate people - every such act counts. We have been the lantern that lights the way to attract the support of high net worth donors and established sources of institutional funding. Organizations such as the SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation have used our donations wisely to produce important progress, both in the sciences and in organizing a research and development community for rejuvenation biotechnology that encompasses both academia and industry. Together we have accomplished a great deal, and this is the time to pledge continued support for the longer term. Now that the wheel is starting to turn, our continued support will aid the years-long work of turning promising starts into therapies widely available in the clinic. The work that has been accomplished to date makes up the tip of the spear, the start of the avalanche, and there is much more ahead. Yet we're well past the hardest point in the curve of bootstrapping a new field of medicine, back when a lot of money was needed to make a small amount of progress, and when it was very hard to find new supporters who saw the potential for treating aging as a medical condition. The funds we donate to the SENS Research Foundation today can now produce greater gains: allies are easier to find, the technology has improved, and more people are willing to listen.
So what are you waiting for? You can make a difference to the future of health and longevity, not just for yourself, but for everyone else as well. You can speed up progress towards the end of aging as a cause of disability and death. This November, become a SENS Patron.
To clarify, do you have to actually sign up on November 1st or at any point in the month of November, to end of year?
@Sadi Khan: Any time from November 1st until the end of the year.
Thank you Reason and everyone for all of your efforts to fight aging and support SENS. Every day another 100,000 lives are lost to aging disease, let's put an end to this ongoing tragedy once and for all!
I will surely donate. Work is going well lately and I think I can maintain a monthly donation.
So would it just make sense to cancel my current recurring monthly donation, and set it up again once November begins?
@Ham: Incentives always have their edge cases. The better thing to do is persuade someone else to start donating on a regular basis.
@Ham We deeply appreciate that you're already a recurring donor. We're trying to encourage enough *new* recurring donors to meet the match. Don't worry, we're confident that we can reach the full amount of the match. :)