Music business entrepreneur Steve Aoki has been a supporter of the SENS rejuvenation research programs for a while now. I'm always pleased to see successful people being vocal about their support for SENS, putting it front and center when talking to their audiences. Placing this important scientific work - as well as the prospects for near future therapies, and the need for philanthropic funding - in front of a bigger audience is vital to the continued growth of our community and progress towards the medical control of aging. We need to reach out to entirely new networks of people, those who would never seek out the longevity science community on their own, as among their numbers are many who will be turn out to be interested, pleasantly surprised, and enthusiastic. Today, I'd wager, a large fraction of those people who will go on to be significant advocates and philanthropic donors of the late 2020s have no idea that we even exist, or that bringing an end to age-related disease, frailty, and suffering is possible outside the realm of science fiction.

Bootstrapping a cause never stops being hard. It was hard when small groups were striving to raise a few thousand dollars for SENS advocacy here and there, when having regular research programs and a million dollar fund looked to be an impossible distance away. It is hard today, when the SENS Research Foundation is trying to make the leap from a few million dollars in yearly research budgets to something ten times that size. Building greater public awareness and enthusiasm for the medical science of human rejuvenation is a very necessary part of that work. The sooner we collectively manage to change the zeitgeist to one in which charitable support for rejuvenation research is just as normal and lauded as support for cancer research, the better off we all are, and the more money that can be raised for scientific projects. So thanks are due to Steve Aoki for stepping up to the plate and taking a swing at this. He is helping with the present year end SENS Research Foundation fundraiser, with the SENS rejuvenation research programs being one part of his broader interest in neuroscience as it can be applied to the long-term health of the brain:

Steve Aoki Throws a Party For Science

Hang with DJ Steve Aoki at a nightclub and you can expect an earful of his electronic bangers and confetti in your hair. Cozy up to Steve Aoki at Brooklyn Bowl on November 15 and you'll get to hit pins alongside neuroscientists, bid on one-of-a-kind experiences in live and silent auctions (think jumping into the foam pit at Aoki's Las Vegas "playhouse") and catch him outside the booth as he hosts the Aoki Foundation's Bowling for Brains fundraiser. The inaugural event supports the Buck Institute on Aging, SENS Research Foundation and Las Vegas' own Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, continuing the foundation's ongoing support of regenerative science. "Anyone who's willing to help out toward brain research and organizations that are focused on cutting-edge research on degenerative brain diseases - I want to meet these people. I want to be in the same room with them and create more collaborations. That's really cool to me. I don't get the opportunity to do that very often because usually when I do events, I'm just DJing. At this one, I get to hang out. It's more of an intimate thing. Anyone who enters can have conversations about brain health and what we can do to raise more money and awareness of these organizations that are doing incredible work. After my father passed away in 2008, I started doing a lot of research on cancer and understanding what killed him. That led to researching general health and nutrition and understanding the body, the brain, then science and technology, seeing how far we've advanced and what kind of trajectories we're heading toward. A lot of it has to do with understanding our brain. It's the single most important phenomenon in civilization - the human brain. Yet we really don't know much about it. At the end of the day, if we don't die from something like cancer, we will have some kind of degenerative issues that will affect us and the people that we love." "We're going down a path that, at one point, was considered science fiction. There are a lot of things happening in science that you wouldn't even believe. These radical technological advances are something I'm excited about. You don't really hear about it because the science community is so small. In a way, I use this platform to say, hey, the science community is pretty small, but the music community is pretty large. I would love to use this platform to bounce all of these amazing advances off to a community that would never hear about it and let them know, hey, you can help out. We can get there faster, and we can get there more efficiently. We're working toward a world where degenerative brain diseases do not exist. Imagine if we could eradicate that like we eradicated tuberculosis or polio, then we wouldn't ever have to worry about it again. If we don't have a brain that's working, we're not ourselves."

Aoki Foundation