Posted 09 December 2004 - 01:15 PM
I hate to use such an iconic image of death as a metaphor for life, but consider the nuclear bomb. 100 years ago, such a thing wasn't even considered possible. Perhaps in the minds of a few eccentric and brilliant scientists it was conceivable...
But for the most part, if anyone believed a hundred years ago that a bomb weighing about as much as a person, or even as much as a dog, could release the equivalent of small mountain's worth of TNT in explosive force and heat, then that person was the equivalent of today's mystics who speak of immortality and divine light and spirituality and higher planes of existence. "Oh, of course such a bomb is possible. If you could bottle God's divine wrath, you could build such a bomb!", or "When cosmic forces come together, positive and negative, like opposite charges, they accelerate and collide with unimaginable force!"
Nonsense, essentially. But then, just a tad under 100 years ago, Einstein published his special theory of relativity. In that work, and in the scientific debate that followed, it became increasingly clear that if we could convert matter to energy directly, we really could release billions times more energy per kilogram than TNT.
But this was all just theoretical; no practical application of this would be possible, right? Well, I don't know how long it took for the scientists of the day to put two and two together, but it wasn't very long. It was known at the time that fission resulted in the production of isotopes that did not add up to the mass of the fissioned atom. And a lot of energy was released. Here then was a mechanism that fit Einstein's theory. And more importantly, it suggested a way to extract that unbelievable amount of energy.
Of course, rather than billions times more energy per kilogram, fission only releases tens of millions times more energy. Not as impressive, but I guess millions times more powerful than the most powerful explosives of the day would have to suffice.
Now there were other useful applications of nuclear energy: well, nuclear power plants for one. But I'll use the bomb, because it was considered less possible than nuclear power plants. I mean, they knew that highly purified radioactive materials get warm, so it was not a stretch to foresee nuclear power plants. But a bomb? Controlling that which was known to be a slow, random process?
It took a war to actually turn that idea into fruition. Even as the bomb was being designed and built, many people, including many prominent scientists, doubted it could be done. Some for scientific reasons, but many for practical, engineering-based reasons.
Yet the bomb was completed.
We are at the equivalent of the latter half of the first decade of the 20th century, those first five years after 1905. I liken Einstein's paper on relativity (later "special" relativity) to Dr. de Grey's announcement of SENS. I liken yesterday's radioactivity to today's biotechnology and nanotechnology. Pioneers such as Robert Freitas are taking concepts such as those in SENS (though I don't know if he was inspired by SENS or came up with it on his own), and devising plans for using nanotechnology to control aging, and even to prevent death itself, at least up to a limit.
But most of the people in the world, including prominent scientists, are doubting that controlling aging, let alone controlling death, is possible. And nothing short of a "war" is going to accelerate the research enough for people in their 40's and older to see aging controlled. Or worse, those of us in our 20's might not even live to see it.
Now that war could be the result of a social security crisis. Or it could be an actual war, between or within nations. But I'd rather see it be a focused public war on aging itself: the casualties would be less troubling. You know, just the 150,000 people who die every day from aging anyway, whether the war is being fought or not. Aging is at war with us, and up until now, we've been holding sit-ins, letting the tanks of senescence roll over us. And I'll tell you something: the sit-ins aren't working. Aging is a cold, ruthless killer. It doesn't care if we aren't fighting back.
It's time to fight back. We need our own nuclear bomb.
That's where the Methuselah Mouse Prize comes in. It's not the only effort that might work; in fact, the more such grand plans that the anti-aging community can come up with, the better. Because nothing short of grand plans are going to work quickly enough. Given another 20 years, biotechnology will have progressed so far that it will no longer be a silly idea to stop aging. But if we wait 20 years before we start even trying, that's lost time. Granted, the technology will be more advanced, so I doubt that a 20 year delay in starting the research will result in a 20 year delay in the cure(s) for aging. But a 20 year delay might mean a 5 or 10 year delay in the cure. And 5 or 10 years is quarter of a billion lives or more.
If, by the end of this decade, the Methuselah Mouse Prize could only come up with a million dollars of funds (and perhaps another five to ten million dollars in long-term pledges), and if that small prize could bring a cure for aging even one month sooner, five million lives could be saved. That would $0.20--just twenty cents--per life saved.
Think of how much money the government is spending on cancer research. In the U.S., it's over six billion dollars of federal money, not counting all the state and private money, which could easily bring the total to be a 10-digit number: $10,000,000,000 or more. And think of how many lives are being saved with that money. Tens of thousands? Maybe hundreds of thousands per year? We're looking at $100,000 or more per life saved.
But are those lives truly saved? If a person lives an extra ten years, is that the same as giving someone another thousand years? If we counted in terms of life-years, money spent on curing aging not only saves more lives, it saves more life-years.
Why even bother giving money to the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Socity, or the American Diabetes Association? Sure, I would rather that someone gave to one of these great causes than to give the money to Walmart. But in the greater scheme of things, it's really not much better, is it? If we're going to use the nuclear bomb analogy, think of Walmart as a firecracker, the AHA or the ACS as a grenade, and the Methuselah Mouse Prize as a a nuclear bomb.
Money that goes to Walmart eventually comes back out, as a paycheck, or an investment in new Walmart locations, or in an investment in the stock martket. That money will eventually find its way to into the biotech sector, one way or another, and by extension help in the war on aging. But like I said, it's just a firecracker. Money to the AHA, the ACS, or the ADA, might help more directly.
But aging is too big a foe to fight with grenades. Grenades may as well be firecrackers. We need nukes. We need nanotech, of the sort envisioned by Robert Freitas. We need biotech, of the sort envisioned by Dr. Aubrey de Grey. While I'm not sure how to accelerate the progress of nanotech, I am sure that the Methuselah Mouse Prize is one way--currently [I]the[I] way--of accelerating biotech.
I apologize if this turned into a rant. Jerusha, you are right. The only way we will get there in time is if we go all out. And there are too many excuses being used by society to not pursue real anti-aging medicine. The MMP will help expose one of those excuses: that it isn't possible. Once it is demonstrated that it's possible--in mammals, since it's already been done in nematodes and flies--then that excuse goes away. The next closely related excuse is that it will take too long, so why bother? But that's the beauty of the MMP. The Longevity Prize shows that long life is possible. But the Rejuvination Prize will help show that, not only is aging slowable, but that it's possible to slow aging in middle-aged mice, and by extension, middle-aged people. If a 40-year-old sees that in 20-30 years, we could dramatically slow aging, then that 40-year-old can look forward to a day when, at the age of 60 to 70, they can be given extra decades. Not years, but decades. Isn't that worth fighting for? More to the point, what does that do to the excuse that "it won't be done in time for me"?
Other excuses remain: over-population, social security and retirement, family structures, religion. Yet each of these questions is already being tackled by the anti-aging community, and the answers to those questions also seem to expose those excuses as just that: they're not reasons, they're excuses. Expose an excuse, and people will be forced to withdraw it or admit hypocrisy.
Okay, end of rant... I think I'll keep working on it and post it at my website, however...
