

Joon Yun's $1M Palo Alto Longevity Prize - exratione
http://paloaltoprize.com/

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exratione
In recent years a growing network of supporters of longevity science has
emerged in the Bay Area entrepreneurial and venture community. It is a highly
networked environment, and visible signs such as the Health Extension meetings
are really just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. It is no accident that the
SENS Research Foundation and its coordination of rejuvenation biotechnology
research is based in the Bay Area: venture capitalist turned philanthropist
Peter Thiel was one of the early high net worth donors to SENS research, and
folk in the software engineering community have always made up a sizable
fraction of the donors and supporters of first the Methuselah Foundation and
then the SENS Research Foundation after it was spun off as an independent
organization. Medicine is engineering, and aging is an engineering problem
asking for a solution: this is something that is perhaps more clearly visible
to people who have written code for a living at some point in their careers.

Which is not to skip over the fact that there is a thriving medical biotech
venture community in that part of the world as well. It just doesn't get as
much press, and the people involved have historically tended to be just as
conservative and quiet about the prospects for treating aging as the rest of
the life science research community. Sometimes change must come from the
outside, which is exactly what happened in this case.

Before funding SENS research the Methuselah Foundation initially focused on
the Mprize: a research prize aiming to spur the research community into doing
more work and speaking more publicly about efforts to extend healthy life span
and produce rejuvenation in the old. At the time the prize launched, the
silence of the research community and their unwillingness to push the
boundaries, educate the public, and get on with treating aging was a real
issue and a cultural roadblock to progress. That this state of affairs has
changed dramatically is due in no small part to the efforts of the Methuselah
Foundation and the networking that took place as a direct consequence of the
existence of a research prize.

In a different world the Mprize might still be generating press and progress
even today, but it was hampered by an unfortunate happenstance of research, in
that one of the first methods discovered to extend life span in mice was so
effective that it has yet to be surpassed or even matched, more than ten years
later. It is hard to have a contest when there are no new winners emerging on
a short enough time frame to interest the public. For my money, I'd wager that
producing mice that live longer than growth hormone receptor knockout mutants
won't happen without the implementation of SENS rejuvenation treatments, ways
to extend life by repairing damage (and thus reversing aging) rather than
slowing the progression of damage (and thus slowing aging).

Nonetheless, the Mprize was a successful vehicle to produce change in the
aging research community: this is the interesting thing about research prizes,
that they don't have to achieve their stated competitive goals or even look
like they worked as a contest in order to produce the desired outcome, a
revival of effort in a specific field of research and development. Success is
all about networking and attention, which in turn leads to fundraising and
greater activity where before there was little. The Methuselah Foundation
still runs the Mprize, but is presently focused on speeding up organ tissue
engineering through the New Organ Prize: working to ensure that patient-
specific organs built from stem cells exist soon rather than twenty years to
thirty years from now.

So perhaps this leaves a space for a next generation of research prizes in
longevity science, and it turns out that folk in the Bay Area venture
community think that is the case - and if there is one thing that these people
are good at, it is networking, the lifeblood of a research prize initiative.
So take a little time to peruse the Palo Alto Longevity Prize and note the
panoply of advisors and research teams signed up to compete. The actual
details of the prize are of technical interest, especially since they lean in
the direction of supporting repair over slowing aging, but they are far less
important than what is taking place behind the scenes as a result of this
initiative.

