Fight Aging!

This year's SENS rejuvenation research fundraiser has three weeks to go, and there are now two challenge funds with money left to match your charitable donations: the $150,000 fund established by Michael Greve's Forever Healthy Foundation, and today Josh Triplett has added another $20,000 above and beyond his generous donations earlier in the year. Thus donations to the SENS Research Foundation made now will be matched twice. Give $100 and a total of $300 will go towards expanding the SENS research programs aimed at bringing an end to age-related disease, frailty, and mortality, an end to the suffering and pain that accompanies aging today. In addition there are still matching dollars left to encourage people to become SENS Patrons. Sign up as a monthly donor to the SENS Research Foundation before December 31st, and Josh Triplett, Christophe and Dominique Cornuejols, and Fight Aging! will match the next year of your donations. If you know someone who hasn't yet decided on the charity he or she will support this year, then point out the good work of the SENS Research Foundation.

As 2016 winds to a close, drawing a line under a tremendous amount of progress towards the first viable rejuvenation therapies based on clearance of senescent cells, I encourage you to reread the SENS materials and the overview of the research programs that the SENS Research Foundation has organized and funded using years of donations from people like you and I. Consider for a moment how fortunate we are to live in an age in which we have the opportunity to help make the end of aging a reality. That there is a good enough understanding of the biochemistry of old tissues to identify the metabolic wastes, the cross-links in the extracellular matrix, the damage to mitochondrial DNA, the senescent cells, and other causes of aging. Further, that biotechnology is moving rapidly enough for the therapies repair and reverse these root causes of aging to be plausible and achievable. That observers such as I can assemble forecasts based on present ongoing work in the scientific and biotechnology communities and order the likely near future clinical availability of various approaches to human rejuvenation. All that remains is to persuade people and to raise the funds needed to make it happen, and in that we are so very much further ahead than we were even a decade ago.

Yet there is so very much left to accomplish! From here it might seem a mountain of work, to go from a world in which next to nothing can be done about aging to a world in which aging is controlled and defeated, but in reality small differences today are all that lie between (a) a future in which aging is, by increments, brought under medical control soon enough to save our lives and those of our children and (b) a future in which aging continues to destroy the lives of everyone. These small differences are the choices made by a handful of people today, choices that will snowball in the years ahead to create significant change: the choices made by researchers, advocates, and everyday philanthropists. If you are one of the modest community whose members read Fight Aging! from time to time, then you are one of those people, knowing enough and seeing far enough ahead to understand that the world can be changed for the better. That aging is not set in stone, and its causes can be repaired. All great and sweeping change starts small, with a few small decisions: the decision to tell a friend about the SENS Research Foundation and the likely prospects for the future; the decision to donate as you can to help the research take place; the decision to learn more about the underlying science.

A golden future lies ahead of us, if we just reach for it. So donate to the SENS Research Foundation, an organization doing a great deal to create that future, removing roadblocks from research and development, and giving rise to serious commercial efforts to produce cost-effective, widely available rejuvenation therapies.