Fight Aging!

Following the commercial shopping days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday is the day for non-profits and charitable donation, Giving Tuesday. It is a young idea, first announced in 2012, but a great idea, and one that has seen considerable adoption. Of this cluster of marked days, I expect Giving Tuesday to be the cultural phenomenon that will produce the greatest long-term change for the better. Just focusing on support for medical research, it is clear that very few people put any thought into where therapies come from and how progress in medicine happens. Every opportunity to explain to the public at large that the most important early stages of medical research are largely funded by philanthropy is an opportunity to increase that funding and speed progress. Yes, most people will ignore the request for help, but every year the communities focused on research for specific diseases grow. Every year more people realize that we live in the midst of a revolution in biotechnology, and medicine can and will make enormous progress in the decades ahead. In our case the disease is aging: addressing the root causes of aging will, to the extent that it is comprehensive and effective, halt and turn back all of the hundreds of named forms of age-related disease, as well as the frailty and degeneration that is currently thought of as normal.

For Giving Tuesday 2016 I ask you to make a donation to the SENS Research Foundation or Methuselah Foundation, organizations that have done more than any other over the past fifteen years to advance the state of rejuvenation research. They have pushed the scientific community towards developing much more of the basis for therapies capable of repairing the cell and tissue damage that causes aging, and funded many of these programs. They have removed roadblocks and enabled other groups to make significant progress. Indeed, the entire culture of the scientific community has changed over that time, from one in which it was career-threatening to talk about extending human life spans to one in which many researchers talk openly and publish papers on this topic. Now the biggest argument is over how to proceed. That, again, has a lot to do with the years of advocacy carried out by the SENS Research Foundation, Methuselah Foundation, and their allies. Fifteen years ago, next to no work on repair of the causes of aging was taking place. Now there is at least some funded research in every important line of work, and some are well funded indeed. This has come to pass because over this time a great many people have made charitable donations to the SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation, and those organizations made very good use of that money.

Until the end of 2016, all single donations made to the SENS Research Foundation will be matched, dollar for dollar, by the generosity of Michael Greve, who has put up a $150,000 challenge fund. Similarly, Josh Triplett, Christophe and Dominique Cornuejols, and Fight Aging! have put up another $36,000 challenge fund that will match the next year of donations for anyone who signs up as a SENS Patron to make monthly donations to the SENS Research Foundation. What are you waiting for?

This is a great time for progress in rejuvenation research and development, and a great time to reinforce that progress. The first class of therapies based on the SENS vision for rejuvenation, clearance of senescent cells, is in active development by a number of startup companies, including Oisin Biotechnologies, seed funded by the Methuselah Foundation and SENS Research Foundation, and UNITY Biotechnology, where the principals have raised more than $100 million to date to bring this therapy to the clinic. Other types of rejuvenation therapy that address other forms of cell and tissue damage are within a few years of that tipping point, given sufficient funding for continued research. Researchers focused on breaking down the cross-links that cause arterial stiffness and loss of elasticity in other tissues have made great strides in building the necessary tools thanks to SENS Research Foundation funding, and are presently engaged in the search for drug candidates. Removal of the amyloids that build up in old tissues is showing progress also in recent years, with a successful trial of clearance of transthyretin amyloid and the first trial in which amyloid-β was cleared in Alzheimer's disease patients. There is much more to tell, but you get the picture. Things are moving, the wheel is turning, and this is in large part due to our support for the SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation in past years.

We, the everyday philanthropists who dare to dream big, have helped to make these successes possible. We have pushing things past the first, hardest part of the bootstrapping process, and brought the end to frailty and disease in aging that much closer. We light the way, by our participation and advocacy attracting those who are more wealthy and conservative in their donations, and who were waiting for signs of support before stepping in. By donating today to the SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation, you help to set the foundation for the successes of the 2020s, for the widespread clinical availability rejuvenation therapies that, given the funding, will come to pass in that decade.