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What is the story of your commitment to life extension?

My commitment is about prevention and curing of diseases and reversing the internal physiological conditions that allow diseases to arise in the first place. If you examine the track history of cures since the civil war in the US, you’ll find that the greatest number of true cures have come from military research. I'm not speaking of treatments or therapies - I'm speaking of cures. The reason for this in my opinion is that the resources of the military are quite large, and the mission of the military (winning and keeping veteran care costs as low as possible) is quite different from commercial concerns whose key concern is to have a product requiring chronic dosing that creates trackable earnings for Wall St and their investors. So, in short, the incentives currently in the system do not produce cures. It's literally too expensive for a company to cure anything. The pill to cover the cost of research, development and marketing would have to cost 6 figures each if you only needed to take one - ever.

How does the Mprize model work?

This is why I love the prize model: You put up the money and tell competitors what they need to do. The larger the prize, the more competitors. It's like an inexpensive way of being able to put chips on every single spot on a roulette table. The best way to find a solution to unknown problems is to generate high motivation among the greatest number of thinkers/actors without too much regard to reputation of the competitors - let the best outcome win - I don't care how they dress!

In addition to the Mprize, I also very much like the SENS approach since it by definition, is an engineering approach to repair/reverse the damage of aging at the molecular level. I very much feel that surgery is another great success story in medicine, and I think of SENS as enzymatic or molecular surgery.

Will the Mprize actually speed up the progress of life extension research?

Developing interventions which work in mice is a critical precursor to the development of human anti-aging techniques, for once it is demonstrated that aging in mice can be effectively delayed or reversed, popular attitudes which view aging as inevitable will no longer be tenable. When aging in mice is shown to be treatable, the funding necessary for a full-scale assault on the human aging process will begin to flow. The Mprize will act as a proof of concept, and demonstrate that age-related debilities and diseases are no longer inescapable, for both current and future generations.

The Mprize is a bold endeavor, and a marvelous legacy to our descendants. From a modest beginning in 2003 the Mprize fund has grown and continues to do so at an accelerating rate, as the notion of improving healthy human longevity continues to progressively make inroads into the public consciousness.