As you might be aware, the SENS Research Foundation is the leading light when it comes to funding the most meaningful research into human rejuvenation. The Foundation staff have the plan, the allied network of researchers and laboratories, and are gathering the necessary funds from philanthropists and a grassroots community of supporters. I strongly encourage you to read the Foundation's research and annual reports to see for yourself that it is the real deal. This is an age of biotechnology in which we no longer have to hope and handwave when it comes to reversing degenerative aging: the way forward to producing future therapies capable of rejuvenating the old and preventing age-related disease is very clear indeed.

Rejuvenation Therapies: All It Takes Is Money

Researchers stand ready and interested. All it will take to get the job done is money and a couple of decades of hard work by hundreds of scientists. But mainly the money: funding is ever the limiting factor, not the availability of researchers or the need for a plan.

This year the SENS Research Foundation has set a year end fundraising target of $100,000 from donors and the community by the end of December. The funds will be used to expand Foundation research and other programs. This is the time of year when people traditionally turn to making charitable donations, but I have to say that this is definitely a stretch goal for our community: the past year has seen numerous funded projects, several in just the last few months alone. Supporters have given tens of thousands of dollars to help fund advocacy and research projects that advance the state of the art.

Fight Aging! Puts Up $15,000 In Matching Funds

Stretch goal or not, I am going to do my part to help make this happen. Through sheer and unlikely happenstance the princely sum of $15,000 recently landed in my lap, out of the blue, and with no strings attached. Sometimes fortune smiles upon us. I am putting this forward as a matching fund for donations to the SENS Research Foundation:

Fight Aging! will match, 1:1, the next $15,000 donated to the SENS Research Foundation before the end of December 2013.

So take the step and donate to help fund the best and the most promising rejuvenation research. I'll match your donation.

Why Fund Rejuvenation Research Now?

Now is the time! For one the research itself is tantalizingly close to applicable results: a few years of sustained funding is all that separates us from laboratory demonstrations of a way to replace age-damaged mitochondrial DNA or a way to remove the greatest contributing factor to loss of skin elasticity, in both cases opening the path to eliminating those contributions to aging.

Secondly it is very self-evident that funding given to research now will snowball and attract much more research funding in the future. In fact this has already happened: our comparatively small community has bootstrapped its way into generating somewhere in the vicinity of $25-30 million of funding for our brand of longevity science and advocacy since the turn of the century. Barely a tenth of that came from the grassroots and the early supporters, but that tenth is by far the most important portion, and those who make it the most important donors. Without the grassroots, without the community and its support and its advocacy, the larger donations never happen: wealth follows the crowds in science funding, and the crowds follow the early adopters.

Yet this is still the ground floor. These are still the early days, in which small acts can make a vast difference to the future of human health and longevity. Most people don't yet know or care about what can be achieved. New billion dollar research communities and vast medical development industries still lie ahead. In 2025 we will look back at 2010-2015 as being a point of takeoff, another early part of the upward curve in which ever more people funded new and revolutionary longevity science instead of giving to the old per-disease foundations, and in which the old institutions began to pay more attention to research into aging: its slowing, and its reversal.

There are precious few times in life when you can stand at a juncture with enough foresight to know that you can swing the odds meaningfully. Most such opportunities slip past us, realized too late. But if you are here now, reading this post, then you are almost certainly one of the folk who knows enough to make a difference.

So Help Me Out Here: Help Us All Live Far Longer and Healthier Lives

Donate! Help the SENS Research Foundation undertake that next research project, make that next investment in a new lab, move that next step towards realizing the means to rejuvenate the old and prevent age-related pain, frailty, and disease.