Prize Structure and Current Record Holders
The foundation currently awards the following two prizes:
- A longevity prize for extending total lifespan
- A rejuvenation prize focusing on intervention begun at older age
The general average lifespan of a normal mouse is 1.5 to 2 years. Whenever a record is broken, the researcher receives an amount based on the current size of the prize and the percentage by which they exceed the previously held record.
The longevity prize allows any type of intervention, including breeding and genetic engineering; only a single mouse has to be presented. As of 2009, the record holder is a mouse whose growth hormone receptor had been genetically knocked out; it lived for 1819 days (almost 5 years). The rejuvenation prize deals with peer-reviewed studies involving at least 40 animals, 20 treated and 20 control. Treatment may begin only at mid-life, and the average lifespan of the 10% longest living treated animals is used for the record. As of 2009, this record stands at 1356 days (about 3.7 years); the treatment was calorie restriction.
Until November 2004, the foundation ran a reversal prize instead of the rejuvenation prize, with the following rules: the treatment of the mouse could be started at any age, and days before treatment had started were counted double. The winner was a mouse that did not receive any dietary or pharmacological treatment at all, just an enriched environment. The mouse lived for 1551 days (about 4.2 years).
Read more about this topic: Methuselah Foundation, Current Projects, The Mprize
Famous quotes containing the words prize, structure, current, record and/or holders:
“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
“I’m a Sunday School teacher, and I’ve always known that the structure of law is founded on the Christian ethic that you shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself—a very high and perfect standard. We all know the fallibility of man, and the contentions in society, as described by Reinhold Niebuhr and many others, don’t permit us to achieve perfection.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Death is another milestone on their way.
With laughter on their lips and with winds blowing round them
They record simply
How this one excelled all others in making driving belts.”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
“Their holders have always seemed to me like a woman who should undertake at a state fair to run a sewing machine, under pretense of advertising it, while she had never spent an hour in learning its use.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)