Some people say, “Oh, you shouldn’t do enhancement” but the thing is we do enhancement all the time — to some extent, all aging reversal is enhancement. Vaccines are enhancement… I think I’m just now getting up to speed after 63 years of education. Aging reversal is something that will buy me and many of my colleagues a lot more time to make many more contributions, so you might consider that a meta-level contribution, if we can pull that off. World-renowned Harvard University biology researcher George Church (source).
Theme of the month. How to contribute financially to research for a much longer healthy life
Introduction
If you have considerable financial means you can afford medical care more easily than less well-off citizens. But whether you are rich or not, with a good « genetic capital » or not, whatever your precautions and your anti-aging clinic visits, in the current state of knowledge your chances are low of living more than 100 years if you are a woman and beyond 95 years if you are of the weaker sex for longevity. And whatever happens, you will not live past 122 years for a woman et 116 years for a man.
To go further will require complex and costly research. If informed citizens pay money to support this research, it will be positive in a direct way by funding the research. It will also be positive in that it will show the growing interest in these issues.
What could you do about it?
Moderate financial support
If your financial means are limited or if you do not wish to make large donations, your action can still have an impact. If every adult citizen of the world donated €1.50 per month this would make an annual investment for longevity of nearly €100 billion. That would be more than the wealth of Bill Gates, the richest person in the world.
But we are far from having a convinced world population. You could give the price of one coffee a day (about €500 per year) or at least the price of one coffee a week (€100 per year).
For small-scale support it makes sense to focus on one goal. The organization that is best known and most active for longevity is SENS (Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence). Aubrey de Grey, the head of this organization, is the world’s best-known biogerontologist. His tireless commitment to this cause led him to give most of a large family inheritance (upon his mother’s death) to fund research.
The Forever Healthy Foundation is another non-profit organisation, this time from the German-speaking world, founded by Michael Greve. It works in partnership with SENS.
Small streams make large rivers but for donations to « rain down », encouragement is needed. If your investments are moderate you can make them visible by countless means: virtual of course (Twitter, Facebook…) but also by contact with your family. There is also an organization that collects donations for longevity and communicates widely about donations. This is the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF).
You can also make donations to organizations that are more involved in communication and exchange of ideas on this subject: at European level Heales (Healthy Life Extension Society) and at international level Longecity and the International Longevity Alliance.
Substantial financial support
If you wish to donate a larger sum (€10,000+) you can certainly ask that the amount be allocated to a research project which seems especially interesting to you. This can even include helping profit-making organizations, because the number of ‘charities’ for longevity research is unfortunately limited. In the French-speaking world, Elvesys is doing some very promising research and also publishes a lot of information about longevity.
In the case of a specific project, a cautious approach is to seek advice first (of course) from the people working on the project in question, but also from one or more longevity specialists who do not have a direct interest in the area concerned.
Major financial support.
A researcher’s work is expensive. €100,000 a year for the financing of a researcher (remuneration plus necessary equipment).
You might decide to invest money in longevity rather than giving it away. A British billionaire, Jim Mellon, recently wrote a book on this subject. This is outside the scope of this letter.
If you have capital to donate representing months, years, decades or centuries of work by a researcher, consider that every day more women and men die from age-related diseases than there were deaths in Hiroshima in the 24 hours following the bombardment. An effective therapy advanced one week by your financial intervention would save nearly a million lives. If you think we have a good chance of doing so, you might even consider it an ethical duty to intervene.
If you make public your donation, the impact will be all the greater the larger it is and the more you are personally disinterested.
Charity begins at home
More selfishly, consider, if you are over 40, that even if you are a multi-billionaire your remaining life expectancy (less than 50 years) is less than that of a baby being born today in the poorest country in the world. Over the next three to four decades, therapies for aging can change dramatically. But they could also remain fairly stable. You can help shape humanity’s evolution… or not.
With significant capital, moreover, it will most probably be possible to be associated with the conduct of research or even the use of new therapies.
Whether you are rich and powerful or weak and poor our time, despite its imperfections, is the best time in the history of humanity to be alive. And you can contribute financially so that tomorrow will be better especially for the older people, that is to say the weakest among us.
The good news of the month:
an international short film competition for longevity
a WHO code for aging
Until September 15 you can take part in the Longevity Film Competition, an international short film competition created to help raise awareness of the importance of fighting age-related diseases. The first prize is 10,000 dollars. An international jury composed of filmmakers, scientists, entrepreneurs and experts in the fields of regenerative medicine, aging and longevity will decide between the candidates.
The international classification of diseases (ICD) is the international standard for clinical diagnosis, epidemiology and health management. As part of the preparation of the 11th version (CIM-11), a code (XT9T) « relating to aging » was introduced. This code allows for clinical evaluation and approval – and for insurance companies to provide cover for – therapies targeting this disease.
For more general information, see in particular: heales.org, sens.org, longevityalliance.org and longecity.org