There's a $1 Million Prize for Engineering a Fountain of Youth

Palo Alto, California, has been appointed the scientific arena for an immortality tournament. Teams of scientists from every part of the world are invited to enter a new million-dollar, Silicon Valley-based competition that has one goal: to end ageing.

The Palo Alto Longevity Prize was launched yesterday by physician, life-enhancing advocate, and hedge fund manager Joon Yun. As of today, 11 teams have taken up the gauntlet (the deadline for team registration is in January 2015).

The rules of the challenge are pretty simple: Every team has to pursue two longevity-increasing objectives, each of which is worth $500,000. The deadline to present their results is set at September 2018.

One of the two goals is quite easy to understand, since it boils down to extending the lifespan of a "reference mammal" by 50 percent. Mice are by far the most popular mammal for similar experiments, so by my maths that means the scientists will have to make a rodent reach the venerable age of around four years and six months, given the average mouse's life expectancy in captivity is about three years.

The other challenge is more technical, and has to do with the restoration of homeostatic capacity in a mammal. Homeostatic capacity is the power of organisms to keep themselves in check—for instance by maintaining the body temperature stable, or the blood pressure regular. The prize's website describes it as similar to "a Weeble, the popular self-centering children's toy." This capability wears off over the years, and it's all but lost in elderly individuals. The idea is that restoring homeostatic capacity would therefore be tantamount to keeping a living "young" for longer.

The winning team has to "restore homeostatic capacity (using heart rate variability as the surrogate measure) of an aging reference mammal to that of a young adult."

How to do that is of course up for experimentation. Each of the teams listed has its own approach to the matter. Some think that the key lies in specific organs, like the hypothalamus or the pituitary gland; others are more keen on systemic tactics, such as harnessing the potential of stem cells, or targeting inflammation, or trying to manipulate the genes altogether.

This variety of approaches is understandable, given the very nature of ageing– a complex and all-encompassing phenomenon that involves many elements of the organism.

The competition's sponsor Joon Yun told the Washington Post his hope is that at least one of them will make some advances in helping "crack the aging code." The million dollar prize comes from his personal finances, and he devised the prize mechanism mainly to make anti-ageing researchers rally together around the shared goal of homeostasis restoration. But he also expects that the competition will catch the eye of investors.

Researchers interested in longevity complain that it is generally underfunded, a state of affairs resulting mainly because it's an ambitious (perhaps too much so) and so far scarcely profitable discipline.

In a video profile posted on the website, one of the competitors, David Mendelowitz of George Washington University, decried the fact that scientists working in the anti-ageing field often have to struggle to obtain any funding at all.

Even well-known foundations like SENS, the brainchild of gerontologist and life-enhancement poster boy Aubrey de Grey (who also sits on the Palo Alto Longevity Prize's advisory board), have yearly budgets of about $4 million.

So one million dollars, while admittedly not a big sum in scientific research, could mark quite an improvement to the current situation.

But that situation could change soon anyway. The Silicon Valley community is flirting more and more with the idea of extending life in a radical way, as the announcement of a new facility for Google's mysterious longevity-seeking company Calico demonstrated last year.

It seems techies are increasingly after long life, and this new tournament is perhaps just testing the water in a greater ongoing quest to conquer mortality as we know it.