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Biotech Science

M Prize For Anti-Aging Research Hits $1,000,000 46

Posted by timothy from the why-if-I-only-had-a-pair-of-eyes-on-the-back-of-my-head dept.
Reason writes "William Haseltine of Human Genome Sciences (the 'father of regenerative medicine') has pushed the M Prize for anti-aging research - a project cofounded by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey and Dave Gobel - over the $1,000,000 mark in pledges. Congratulations to all involved! Read the press release here."
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M Prize For Anti-Aging Research Hits $1,000,000 More

M Prize For Anti-Aging Research Hits $1,000,000

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  • Immortal (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @09:30PM (#11883994)
    There will never be a discovery (publically at least) of indefinitely life-extending consequence. There will, however, be discoveries that prolong life. But not too much at a time.

    If you figure out a way to make people life forever or at least a very long time, you can only make them pay for it once. If you discover a way to make people live an extra decade, they'll pay through the nose for it, eventually die, move on and you'll have a new generation of customers.

    It's just like medications and diseases. It's not in the interest of commercialized medicine to research and discover CURES. It's in their interest to research and discover medications that make living with a disease tolerable or prolong your life with the disease rather than eradicate it.

    • Re:Immortal (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Wow, someone has their tinfoil hat on extra tight today...

    • Re:Immortal (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kasparov ( 105041 ) * on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @11:46PM (#11884924)
      Um... if people live forever, it doesn't mean that new people wouldn't be born who would need to obtain the 'immortality serum'. Birth rates would probably slow, but not stop. (And don't give me the overpopulation angle, necessity is the mother of invention.

      But frankly, the people interested in helping people live forever probably aren't that concerened with doing it for profit in the first place. (And if you have ever seen a picture of Aubrey de Grey [cam.ac.uk] you will understand what I'm talking about.)

      Don't discount non-commercialized medicine/research for eventually finding the 'cure for aging'. Who would have thought that someone would release a 'free' enterprise-grade operating system when they could actually charge for it indefinitely with upgrades and service packs.

    • Bring on... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Schwarzchild ( 225794 )
      the Boosterspice!!! Just think of how rich someone could get if they could live several lifetimes over.

    • Re:Immortal (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dshannon ( 704783 )
      Sorry, but you just miss a major point - if someone manufactures a pill, taken once daily, that make you live *forever*, then that's an awful lot of pills a day we're all (many of us at least) going to be paying for, *forever*, ergo a lot of moolah to be made. A single-shot serum seems as ridiculous as all those 'fountain of eternal youth' movies.

    • If you figure out a way to make people life forever or at least a very long time, you can only make them pay for it once. If you discover a way to make people live an extra decade, they'll pay through the nose for it, eventually die, move on and you'll have a new generation of customers.

      Actually, if you read the SENS plan [cam.ac.uk], you'll see that most of the interventions suggested there would have to be performed regularly, every decade or two, and some of the procedures [cam.ac.uk] don't look cheap (replacing the stem ce

    • There will never be a discovery (publically at least) of indefinitely life-extending consequence. There will, however, be discoveries that prolong life. But not too much at a time.

      No offense, but I think this view may be a bit naive.

      Think about it this way: you always have to die of something. While we can say that someone died of old age, for instance, the truth is they died of something - heart failure, or a stroke, or organ failure. Saying that you can't extend life indefinitely is essentially like sa
    • There will never be a discovery (publically at least) of indefinitely life-extending consequence. There will, however, be discoveries that prolong life. But not too much at a time.

      Why not open source medicine?

      We have open source software. And it benefits everyone who works on it if life extension becomes an actuality. So there may be plenty of volunteers, particularly among the retired community...

    • you don't need to solve immortality immediately. You need to extend your life long enough for technology to constantly improve the ability to extend and regenerate the body.

      It is like surfing...just don't fall off, the sharks all have sickles and are voiced by Adam Carolla.
  • I'm sorry, but we are almost to the point of living too long as it is. There are way, way, way better causes to put that kind of money up for. Besides, the only people who will benefit from this are the very rich, which if you think about it are probably the people who are putting this money up in the first place.

    Vain bastards. Thank god most of Africa probably doesn't know about this.
    • We have our next candidate for elective depopulation. Proceed to suicide booth at once please.

    • Re:Better causes (Score:5, Insightful)

      by koreth ( 409849 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @10:57PM (#11884649)
      Besides, the only people who will benefit from this are the very rich

      A conclusion you reach based on what? Plenty of medical treatments that started out expensive are widely available now.

      Hell, that's true of technology in general, not just medical technology. Think about flying from New York to Shanghai on a schoolteacher's salary in the 1930s, when the term "jet set" actually referred to air travel. Should money have not been spent on the aviation infrastructure we all enjoy today, since it was just a bunch of vain bastards using it at first?

      Only big companies and the military could afford early computers. UNIVAC was clearly no use to starving kids in Africa, so for the betterment of humanity we really should have put a stop to that line of research and put those scientists to work in soup kitchens instead. We'd all be so much better off now.

      After all, if it benefits one rich person a decade or two before it benefits ten poor people, it should never be developed and all eleven people should suffer. Or at least that seems to be the logical result of what you're saying.

      If you'd rather skip using any treatments that were initially high-priced, that is of course your prerogative.

    • A HUNDRED THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS SUFFER and die everyday due to age-related disease, costing over 218 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR to look after the dependent elderly in the United States alone, and this amount is set to increase by 600 percent over the next few decades. Is there anything better you think that might be accomplished with this vast amount of capital currently earmarked to give our elderly mothers and fathers some quality and dignity?

      From any perspective, ethical, moral, or practical, applying the

  • Are you joking? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Mercury2k ( 133466 )
    Wow, only 1million bucks to the person who cures natural death? No wonder why nobody is in a rush. You can make more money engineering bio weapons for the states. ;p

    • Re:Are you joking? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DaemanUhr ( 829300 )

      ...to the person who cures natural death?

      The prize is for curing aging, and curing natural death is not the same thing.

      Not that there's not a strong correlation, but 10-year-olds die of natural causes too. It's just that old people are just a hell of a lot more prone to die of natural causes. If we can make old people more like young people, they'll still die, but just far less often.

      Wow, only 1million bucks to the person who cures natural death? No wonder why nobody is in a rush. You can make more

    • It is highly unlikley that The MPrize will result in usable human therapies. Its purpose is to draw the attention of the general public to the fact that aging is not as 'inevitable' as one might think now that we have the technology to intervene and treat it like the universal disease it is.

      Once people see that scientists are hot on the trail of making a mouse live longer they will start looking at their own lives, and those of their loved ones, and begin to ask for those same improvements.
  • I can't help but notice that the most gung-ho anti-aging advocates are those entering a phase of life where they become painful aware and fearful of their own mortality. Nothing wrong with that, but they never just come out and say it.
    • Don't forget the clock is ticking for their children, and likely for more than a few parents of these individuals who see the possibility of extending their loved ones lives.

      I would love to give the parents who gave me life the opportunity to have a few more healthy years of their own to enjoy their grandkids.

      The people who benefit from this technology are REAL individuals who have value to someone.

  • It's for mice, not humans. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Chemisor ( 97276 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @10:26PM (#11884421)
    I don't know about you, but if I discovered immortality, I certainly wouldn't tell anyone. Just imagine all those stupid people you know, hanging around you forever! *shudder* If I keep it a secret, then I'll be sure to outlive them. Eventually.

  • Smart project, if you're seeking donations... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JavaRob ( 28971 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @10:31PM (#11884456) Homepage Journal
    From the article:
    The Methuselah Foundation has in a very short time built up a strong base of support, relying largely on donations from individuals, most of them middle class, most of them outside academia.
    I'm actually not surprised that they've managed to rustle up this kind of cash from private donations so quickly. Think about it -- you've been working all your life to make a comfortable living, but now you're feeling old and are starting to think about:
    1) your mortality
    2) what to do with your money before you go

    Introducing the perfect solution.... Not only is it a nice "I'm helping humanity" sort of cause, but you also stand a chance of pushing that deadline out a bit.
  • The biggest irony about human immortality is that most of the people who desperately long for immortality can't figure out what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

    For myself, I think a century in good health would be more than enough.

    But maybe it's not nearly the idea of immortality, as the ability to choose when you're done.

    • I don't know, I never have trouble figuring out what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

      Being at school, there's always an assignment, problem set, quiz, test or exam creeping up the next week. I can barely find a whole day to dedicate to something vaguely resembling a "social life". And of course, if school and real life people fail, there's always Slashdot.

      Ah, eternity reading Slashdot... Heaven.

      Heh... Heh... :-(

      - shazow

    • Re:You want to be immortal to do exactly what? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by some guy I know ( 229718 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @12:32AM (#11885224) Homepage
      For myself, I think a century in good health would be more than enough.
      Wait'll you hit 50.
      I found it very enlightening to be on the other side of "half my life".
      The older I get, the more I think that, no, one century will probably not be enough.
      A millenium, maybe, but even then ...
      I want to see the future.
      I want to go to the stars.
      There are four ways to do this:
      1. Build a time machine and go to the future that way (highly unlikely).
      2. Build a spacecraft whose velocity approaches that of the speed of light, so that time within it slows down, and ride that to the stars, like Ender Wiggin and his siblings (unlikely in my lifetime, if my lifetime extends only another 50-75 years).
      3. Freeze myself, like Fry in Futurama (possibly).
      4. Undergo medical procedures and live a lifestyle designed to increase my lifespan (most likely).
      The great advantage of option 4 is that I will be able to perceive and experience the intervening years.
      I think that it will be fun, for the most part.
      • Wouldn't flying to the stars be a lifestyle NOT designed to increase your lifespan? I mean, FTL travel is unlikely in the near future so you're faced with thousands of years of travel time to the nearest stars. That's thousands of years that you're doing what? Being frozen? While pretty much ANYTHING could go wrong with your ship? And what do you do when you get there? Say "Yep, it's a star! Time to go home!"? Then travel thousands of years back to an earth where the apes now rule the planet? Think I'll pas
        • First of all, if my life span were thousands of years, I could wait around the Solar System doing other things until ships got fast enough that they would't take thousands of years to get from star to star.

          Alternatively, I could move out to the Mars/Jupiter Asteroid belt, then to the Kuiper Belt, then to the Oort cloud, which some astronomers believe extends from star to star.
          By moving from comet to comet, I would eventually, after thousands of years, make it to another star system.
          (Although, by that time,
          • "And as far as apes ruling the Earth, I think that it would be a good idea if humans, once they had the technology to live in space, were to leave the Earth and let another species evolve to dominance."

            YES! I'm all for it! My money's on the raccoons, or maybe the possums! They have prehensile thumbs and all! Dang now I'm going to have to get to work on a monolith...

      • I tend to agree that a century in good health would be more than enough. I'm glad you found it very enlightening to be on the other side of 50. I'm kind of sickened to hear people talk like that. Espescially since it has a condescending edge towards people who are younger ("You'll understand when you're on the other side of 50"). I was diagnosed with a life-threatening chronic illness when I was 18, and my situation is not special, there are many others, including a few friends who have already died. T

        • If you need to watch two buildings collapse and half your life pass by to realize that you should be appreciating it more, congratulations, you've been wasting your life.

          You have totally misinterpreted what I wrote.

          1. The 9/11 attack didn't affect me at all, except for making me annoyed with the networks for pre-empting my normal TV shows for weeks with endless repeats of the same footage with nothing new to add, and with the FAA for the even longer lines at airports.
          Oh, and I'm also annoyed with congres

    • That's a pithy quote, to be sure (though the original is slightly different [quotationspage.com]) but I, for one, think there's way more stuff to see and do than I could fit into a hundred years. Hell, at the rate I'm going it'll take me nearly that long just to make it through all the books on my Amazon wishlist! Plus I can't imagine ever not wanting to live just one more year to see what happens next in the world. I have no trouble entertaining myself on a Sunday of just about any sort of weather.

      That said, I agree with you

    • Re:You want to be immortal to do exactly what? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You need an analogy to make it all clear.

      I will play for you the most wondrous song that you have ever heard. It will be a song to stir the soul, and make the angels weep in joy for the beauty of it all.

      But, here's the catch. I will now renege on my promise and play you only a small part. A fraction of a part. A fraction of that fraction.

      This fraction has been rendered so short, that all beauty has been stolen. There is no context, there is no continuance. You will never be able to appreciate the song a
  • Congratulations to all involved!

    That would be... uh... all of us.

    So, er, thanks.
  • Anti-Gerasone- Cheap immortality comes to your neighborhood convenience store.

    I can't wait for the cities to grow until there is no border between them.

  • How the prizes work (Score:5, Informative)

    by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:43AM (#11885653) Journal
    One point which hasn't been made here yet is how the M Prizes are actually being awarded. These aren't one-time awards -- rather, a new cash award is given out each time the previous longevity record is broken, with the amount depending on how much the old record was beaten by.

    The details from this page [mprize.org]:

    Longevity Prize (LP): details

    The Longevity Prize is won whenever the world record lifespan for a mouse of the species most commonly used in scientific work, Mus musculus, is exceeded.

    The amount won by a winner of PP is in proportion to the size of the fund at that time, but also in proportion to the margin by which the previous record is broken. The precise formula is:

    Previous record: X days
    New record: X+Y days
    LP fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of death of record-breaker
    Winner receives: $Z x (Y/(X+Y))

    Thus, hypothetically, if the new record is twice the previous one, the winner receives half the fund. If the new record is 10% more than the old one, the winner receives 1/11 of the fund. The fund can thus never be exhausted, and the incentive to break the new record remains intact indefinitely. (This is in contrast to a structure that specifies a particular mouse age whose first achiever gets the whole fund.) We believe that this is important, because the public attention will be best maintained if there is a steady stream of record-breaks, showing that scientists are taking progressively better control of the aging process.

    The record-breaker will receive prize money every week from the point where they beat the previous record. The amount paid each week will be as if their mouse had just died; the total amount won so far by a living record-breaker will be prominently displayed on the web site.

    Rejuvenation Prize (RP): details

    The Rejuvenation Prize rewards successful late-onset interventions. There are many ways to structure a prize to achieve this goal. The Rejuvenation Prize has been instituted (in replacement of the Reversal Prize -- see above) so as to satisfy two additional shortcomings of the Longevity Prize: first, that it is of limited scientific value to focus on a single mouse (a statistical outlier), and second, that the most important goal is to promote the development of interventions to restore youthful physiology, not merely to extend life. Thus, the Rejuvenation Prize rules are as follows:

    1) The Rejuvenation Prize is awarded not for an individual mouse but for a published study. The study must satisfy the following criteria:

    - The treated and control groups must have been at least 20 mice each.
    - The intervention must have been begun at an age at least half of the eventual mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the CONTROL group.
    - The treated mice must have been assessed for at least five different markers that change significantly with age in the controls, and there must be a statistically significant reversal in the trajectory of those five markers in the treated mice at some (unrestricted) time after treatment began versus some (also unrestricted) time before it began. (It is OK if other markers do not show this.)

    2) The record that a new prizewinner has to beat should be the mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the treated group.

    Conveniently, the Rejuvenation Prize does not require the same rigorous validation procedures as the Longevity Prize, because the age involved is defined to be that reported in the publication of the study.
  • ...this is old news...

    I heard recently (on /.?) that people who are 60 today may be the first people to hit 100 years old (based on a 0.001 % chance of dying each year - hence non-auto-mortal)

    So in 20-25 they may bring together all reverse aging/ageing techniques.

    I say MILF sites will have to be redefined!

  • And we think social security is screwed up now! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @10:44AM (#11888242) Journal
    It got that way partly because the math on which it was founded [men living to 60 if they are really lucky, women not working and popping off at 75] has been overturned by medical advances so now there's a shitload of oldsters who need a check every month.
    boy would immortality or anything like it mess our society up!
    • Social Security was for people who couldn't work any more and 'retirement' was a euphemism for 'go home and prepare to die you used up husk of a human'. This is no longer the case and hasn't been for sometime as people are healthier than ever as they reach their final decades.

      Certainly individuals who are capable of adding something to society by putting out more into the world than taking in, should. Perhaps in a world of lifetimes marked in centuries, one might just *posssibly* find something else in
    • The problem with SS is minor. It'll keep paying out benefits at the future promised levels up to 2042 without changes. So there is time to fix the problem right, anyone who tells you different is after your vote or your money and should have the same credibility as an RIAA spokesdroid. Basically, the real problem with SS is that the administrators don't have the flexibility a private enterprise pension fund has to change defined contributions, eligibility, or payments, as all of this stuff is defined by Fed
  • Here's an article on the guy, with pics. Says he is not a real biologist though. http://www.slate.com/id/2115015/

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