15

War Bonds for the Campaign Against Aging

It is, as you now know, my bold but solidly grounded contention that there is a strong chance that you—the reader of this book—will live to experience the rejuvenation of your body into a flesh that is years or even decades younger, biologically, than your chronological age, leading ultimately to an endless summer of literally perpetual youth. But that is a prediction about what could be—not about what must be. Make no mistake: Once the War on Aging begins, it must end in victory, and the future of indefinite health will be ours. But whether that process begins in time to save our parents, or only ourselves, or only our children, or even their children depends entirely on when the first bomb of that war—the achievement of robust mouse rejuvenation (RMR)—is finally dropped. So with that understanding, the key question for each of us is, What am I going to do about it?

Granted that the War on Aging could begin in as little as a decade, it makes sense to take care of yourself and your family, so that you don’t miss out on the arrival of robust human rejuvenation by just a few years. There is plenty of well-established science on this front: eat more fruits and vegetables, get your essential fatty acids, exercise, and maintain a healthy weight. But a much more effective way to increase your personal odds of seeing your body rejuvenated—and one that has the decided advantage that it also increases the odds of survival for those close to you, and for untold thousands that you have never even met—is to hasten the day when the battle is well and truly joined. Fortunately, there are some very powerful things that you can do, today, to help ensure the saving of lives, again of tens of thousands of lives a day, possibly including your own or your most dearly beloved. The most immediately obvious actions would be to lobby for more funding for rejuvenation research, and for the crucial lifting of restrictions on federal funding to embryonic stem cell research in the United States, by writing letters to your political representatives, demanding change.

But an even more powerful thing you can do is to donate to the Methuselah Foundation.

Let’s step back a moment to remind ourselves of where we are today, and see how we can affect our future.

Remember the logjam that I outlined in Chapter 13? The reason why the investments necessary to bring forward robust mouse rejuvenation—the first and critical benchmark for the instigation of a total life-and-death struggle against biological aging—are so hard to obtain lies in a mutually reinforcing ring of politically directed funding restrictions, scientific over-caution in public statements and grant requests, and public opinion. The fastest way out of this vicious circle is to create an independent source of funding, pouring the needed billion or so dollars directly into work designed to achieve RMR. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to raise the funds required to do this in a short time frame, precisely because of the widespread pessimism engendered in the public by scientists afraid for their careers in a world where the logjam exists.

There are two plausible ways to change that, and the Methuselah Foundation is the worldwide spearhead for both of them.

The first is to support SENS research directly. You can do that by donating to the Methuselah Foundation, because we are a standard science funding organization. Just like the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, our scientific team, headed by me as Chief Science Officer, evaluate scientific publications and research findings and provide funds to professors around the world. The difference between us and other agencies, of course, is that we are focused on a particular goal and we are not afraid to fund projects that may take a long time to succeed.

Or…that may not succeed at all. And that’s why, by way of hedging our bets, we have the second strategy.

I believe that SENS is far and away the most promising way to achieve RMR soon and corresponding human therapies thereafter—but, like any scientist, I could be wrong. Really hard technological goals, whether in medicine or elsewhere, vary a lot in terms of how confident the experts in the relevant field are that their preferred approach will work. At one extreme, in some cases there is almost no doubt about how to proceed—all that holds the project back is availability of resources. The Apollo project was a fine example of this: once national pride freed up the necessary cash, the project went from start to finish faster than Boston’s Big Dig. But at the other extreme—powered flight before 1900, for example, or essentially all medicine before 1800—people have ideas about what might work that are still extremely speculative, and attempt after attempt fails or never even gets tested. Testing everything that might work just costs too much for any organization, even a highly motivated government, to afford when there are so many comparably plausible possibilities.

Luckily, there is one time-tested strategy that has been successfully used, again and again, to solve engineering challenges of this sort without having to raise even a small fraction of the full sum required to complete the project. That strategy is the research prize.

Research prizes with a specific benchmark have a long and illustrious track record of producing the development of effective prototype technologies with only a small investment of funds. Charles Lindbergh’s famous transatlantic flight in 1927; John Harrison’s invention of a way to fix the longitude location of a vessel at sea (crucial to successful navigation away from a coastline); and the dramatic photo-finish race for the first privately funded suborbital flight with human cargo that was driven by the Ansari X-Prize, are all examples of the power of such prizes to spur daring technological innovation.

What is so powerful about research prizes is that they only reward success. Not a single dollar of the prize goes out until someone achieves the goal laid out by its creators. As a result, the existence of a single prize motivates many teams of independent scientists and engineers to go after it—each of them using a different approach, and each of them investing their own dollars independently. As a result, the money that is mistakenly invested in approaches that are ultimately shown to be unsuccessful does not deplete the prize jackpot by a single penny. In the end, about ten to twenty dollars is ultimately laid out by the contestants for every dollar raised to put in the jackpot of a research prize—even though each contestant usually gambles less private money than is sitting in the pot—and the goal of the prize is achieved at a cost to the prize’s principals that is far less than would be required for a monolithic “Apollo Project” approach.

You can see where this is going.

The Methuselah Mouse Prize (or Mprize, with a tip of the hat to the recent success of the X Prize) is a project that was dreamed up independently around the turn of the century by a few biogerontologists (starting with Gregory Stock’s concept of the Prometheus Prize) and by long-time humanitarian visionary David Gobel. When David and I discovered each other, our complementary talents allowed us very rapidly to bring the prize to fruition. The purpose of the project is to break the logjam that we’ve been discussing using a research prize structured similarly to the X Prize model. Enjoying the support of X Prize Chair and CEO Peter Diamandis as a chief advisor, the Mprize’s chief project is the Rejuvenation Prize for the greatest extension of life span in mice that are already elderly—in other words, for progress toward fully-fledged robust mouse rejuvenation.

The Mprize has the potential to remove the stumbling blocks that currently restrict scientists in government and industry from taking on the aging process as a curable disease. For the scientists in academia, it creates an incentive to write the right grant proposals, in hopes of obtaining more funding directly and greater prestige for their institutions by winning the prize—prestige that itself tends to attract more funding from outside sources.

But not only that: it’s a popular win, too. The prize concept, by its nature, captures public imagination and provides a dramatic way to inform the public and the media that scientists are working on extending healthy life spans in mammals. This increases the credibility of any similar reputable efforts, and wins acceptance for the idea that it can be done in humans. In turn, changes in public opinion ease political constraints on awarding public funding for such projects, and may even generate active pressure for such awards to be made before RMR has occurred.

And the Mprize also reorients the incentives for industry. Right now, there is no specific motivation for private researchers to perform life span studies in mice: at most, they are a stepping stone toward long, expensive, human trials. When a significant financial reward—and the promise of substantial publicity—is on the table, however, a business case is created for spending a few years rather than a few months in testing a compound in mice. Should a startup company succeed in rejuvenating mice, you can bet that Big Pharma will be beating down its door for the rights to translate their intervention to humans.

Thus, the Mprize can bypass the vicious circle that has put the chill on serious biomedical gerontology in academic research. More than this: it can reverse its course, putting its converging, self-reinforcing mechanisms to work in a new, virtuous circle. Scientific results will drive public optimism, in turn driving political acceptability, leading to more public and private funding. Those investments will eventually—maybe very rapidly—lead to robust mouse rejuvenation even if the SENS approach were to falter; and then, the War on Aging will begin in earnest.

Eat well, exercise, and support the Methuselah Foundation, and I shall look forward to shaking your hand in a future where engineered negligible senescence is a reality: where we can enjoy dramatically extended lives in a new summer of vigor and health, the dark specter of the age plague driven away by the sunshine of perpetual youth.