Daily Archives: November 3, 2005

The THREE Million Dollar Mouse

Our good friend Reason reports on an exciting development: $1 million donation just received by the Methuselah Mouse Prize:


Yes, you read that right: Mprize, $1 million donation, and I have it from Dave Gobel that the cashier’s check just cleared today. Wow. This was somewhat out of the blue, and certainly far ahead of our expectations for progress in the rest of 2005!

Let me be one of the first to thank the anonymous donor for his or her generosity and for greatly raising the level of vindication experienced by the Mprize volunteers and other donors. This is a big step forward for efforts to vitalize serious scientific progress towards a cure for aging. There is a long way to go yet – and more seven figure donations, I hope – but thank you, anonymous donor, for pushing the best present day effort into the major leagues.

We’ll second those thanks. Unlike other prizes where all the drama and intrigue derive from who is going to win, the Methusaleh Mouse Prize continues to be intriguing on both ends. Watching the prize amount grow like this is really quite exciting.

20-20 Hindsight

Our ability to look into the deep past has never been greater:

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope may have detected the infrared glow from the very first generation of stars, a new study reports. If confirmed, the work would reveal the structure of the universe a few hundred million years after the big bang, when the galaxies that exist today were just beginning to take shape.

Is it ironic or somehow symmetrical and appropriate that the wave of technological advances which enable us to see so far into the past also make it next to impossible even to imagine — much less predict — what kinds of changes will be occuring over the next century or so?