On the Methuselah Mouse Prize
Thoughts on the Methuselah Mouse Prize for longevity research from the Economist: "To encourage people to take his ideas seriously, Aubrey de Grey, the originator of the strategies for engineered negligible senescence, has organised a competition. He is offering a prize for the development of what he calls a Methuselah mouse. There are actually two prizes to be had. One is for longevity, the other for rejuvenation. The prize for longevity can be won by a new strain of mouse - one bred or genetically engineered to live a long time. That for rejuvenation requires treatment to begin when the mice are already in middle age. ... The winner establishes a record that others have to break. At the moment the records for longevity and rejuvenation are five years and almost four in an animal that normally lives for three. How translatable the lesson of a Methuselah mouse will be to people is a matter of debate. ... The reason mice age rapidly is that they have lots of predators and would get killed quickly anyway. Humans have few predators and tend not to get killed - at least not as easily as mice. It is therefore worthwhile for people to evolve better repair mechanisms than mice, and thus to age more slowly." Nonetheless, radical life extension in lesser mammals is an important step along the way - not just as a proving ground for the science, but as a way of educating the public as to the degree to which aging can potentially be reversed in humans.
Link: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10423468