Methuselah Foundation

Overview

The Methuselah Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization of professional and non-professional volunteers who are dedicated to fighting age-related disease with new technologies.

We directly fund aging research based on the proposals of Chief Science Officer and co-founder Dr. Aubrey de Grey and sponsor the Methuselah Mouse Prize (Mprize), a financial award that acts as an incentive for scientists to create the world's longest-lived mouse.

Mission

Our mission is no less than to see age-related disease become a unpleasant part of history. We are determined to see the power and potential of new technologies used to reduce and eliminate the suffering and burden of the aging process, letting getting older become a process which truly enriches society and the individual.

History

The Methuselah Foundation was founded in 2003 out of a previous effort by philanthropist David Gobel when he and Dr. Aubrey de Grey decided to join forces and offer a competitive prize to spur aging research. Since that time a number of professional and non-professional volunteers have banded together to make the Foundation a force to accelerate the development of relevant technologies, by both funding research directly and through the use of competitive prizes.

Program

The Methuselah Foundation has two major initiatives:

1) Directly Fund Research: based on the proposals described in the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence program conceived by Chief Science Officer and co-founder, Dr. Aubrey de Grey.

SENS is a detailed plan for curing human aging. SENS is an engineering project, recognizing that aging is a medical condition and that medicine is a branch of engineering. Aging is a set of progressive changes in body composition, at the molecular and cellular level, which are side-effects of essential metabolic processes. Many of these changes are eventually bad for us -- they are an accumulation of damage, which becomes pathogenic above a certain threshold of abundance.

The traditional approach is to try to slow down this accumulation of damage. This is a misguided strategy, firstly because it requires us to improve biological processes that we do not adequately understand, and secondly because it can even in principle only retard aging rather than reverse it. An even more short-termist alternative is the geriatric approach, which is to try to stave off pathology in the face of accumulating damage; this is a losing battle because the continuing accumulation of damage makes pathology more and more inescapable.

Instead, the engineering (SENS) strategy is not to interfere with metabolism per se, but to repair or obviate the accumulating damage and thereby indefinitely postpone the age at which it reaches pathogenic levels. This is practical because it avoids both of the problems with the other approaches: it sidesteps our ignorance of metabolism (because it does not attempt to interfere with metabolic processes and their production of side-effects) but also it pre-empts the chaos of pathology (because it repairs the precursors of pathology, rather than addressing the pathology head-on).

2) Sponsorship of Competitive Prizes for Aging Research: currently our premiere effort is the Methuselah Mouse Prize (Mprize).

The Methuselah Mouse Prize is being offered to the scientific research team who develops the longest living Mus musculus, the breed of mouse most commonly used in scientific 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 towards aging as 'inevitable' will no longer be possible. When aging in mice is shown to be 'treatable' the funding necessary for a full-line assault on the aging process will be made available. This is the true power of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, to demonstrate a proof of principle, and give hope to the world that decline in function and age-related disease are no l

Impact

Over 100,000 people suffer and die every day from age-related disease and debilitation. It is hard to imagine a more important effort than the defeat of the many chronic and degenerative syndromes that aging causes. Putting aside the immense ethical and moral imperative to develop new technologies as quickly as possible to decrease the suffering and emotional burden that aging inflicts, there is an equally immense economic and financial incentive to do so as well.

With many healthy elderly would come the unlocking of the capital currently earmarked to help provide them with a quality of life in their last years, amounting to trillions of dollars. How many things could be done in the world with such funding?

Additionally, unlocking the resources of wisdom and experience in individuals who have lived a century or more would enable us to approach perennial problems with a different viewpoint. If we are to deal with the long-term problems of today and advance human culture and civilization, we must repeat the past and increase the length of time that people are alive in order that the potential of the wisdom and experience they attain in life can be explored and realized.

The existential risks which face humanity today require a common acceptance of the need to cooperate and face these global problems together. Mature perspectives of the necessity for cooperation and the need for developing 'win-win' scenarios, rather than using out-moded competitive models that can only continue to provide inadequate answers to complex modern problems, will be the result of longer and healthier lifespans.

Goals This Year

We would like to see another 50 members join The Three Hundred. The Three Hundred are a special group of individuals who see the potential of new technologies and the need for sustained support for our efforts and are able to be that sustained support.

I hope you will consider joining us!

Chief Executive

David Gobel

Chief Executive Profile

David Gobel is Chief Executive Officer of the Methuselah Foundation. He founded the original non-profit in 2000, which became the Methuselah Foundation in an effort to reverse or preempt the damage of aging and the unimaginable suffering this continues to inflict. He is voraciously curious, a serial entrepreneur, unrepentant do-gooder and technology visionary, having conceived many breakthrough technologies, then going on to found or co-found private and venture capital backed companies and non-profits purpose built to deliver them. Examples are Knowledge Adventure, one of the earliest and most successful educational multimedia software developers to date, Worlds Inc – inventor of shared virtual worlds over the internet, Starbright Foundation’s Starbright World designed to allow hospital bound children to be able to “go out and play” in a rich virtual world and communicate with friends and family, Methuselah Foundation and most recently the SuperCentenarian Research Foundation – focusing on those few among us who are 110 years and older to research why and how they live so long, and what causes them to die.

Board

David Gobel is Chief Executive Officer of the Methuselah Foundation. He founded the original non-profit in 2000, which became the Methuselah Foundation in an effort to reverse or preempt the damage of aging and the unimaginable suffering this continues to inflict. He has been involved with building other visionary organizations. An example is Knowledge Adventure, one of the earliest and most successful educational multimedia software developers to date, Worlds Inc – creator of virtual worlds designed to allow hospital bound children to be able to “go out and play” .

Aubrey de Grey, PhD, is Chairman and Chief Science Officer of The Methuselah Foundation. His major research interests are the role and etiology of all forms of cellular and molecular damage in mammalian aging, and the design of interventions to reverse the age-related accumulation of such damage. He has published extensively on these and other areas of gerontology, and is also Editor-in-Chief of the high-impact journal Rejuvenation Research, the only peer-reviewed academic journal focusing on intervention in aging.

Kevin Perrott is Executive Director of The Mprize competition and Outreach Coordinator of the Methuselah Foundation. He has helped build one of the most successful recreational vehicle dealerships, Riverside Honda in Alberta, Canada, which has been in business for over 40 years. He completed a Bachelor of Science degree specializing in Biochemistry and is in the PhD. program at the University of Alberta.

Countries of Operation

United States

States of Operation

Virginia