What’s the most humanitarian way to spend ten million euros?
Imagine that a rich acquaintance gifted you €10 million, and you wanted to have the biggest humanitarian impact from the way you spend that money. You gather some friends to review your options.
There are some reasonably straightforward ways you could spend that money, to improve people’s lives here and now:
- Providing food for people who are malnourished
- Obtaining shelter for people who are homeless or dispossessed
- Purchasing medical vaccines, for people in an area where infectious diseases pose problems
- Improving hygiene and sanitation.
But you might also consider tackling some root causes. As the saying goes, instead of buying fish for a group of people, you could teach them how to fish for themselves. Instead of paying for prosthetic limbs for people injured in war zones, you could in principle help negotiate a lasting peace settlement. Instead of covering medical costs for people who suffer chronic diseases arising from bad lifestyle choices, you could pay for effective prevention campaigns. And – and this is the big one – instead of trying to treat the individual diseases that become more prevalent as people become older – diseases such as cancer, heart failure, and dementia – the diseases from which most people die – you could tackle their common underlying cause, namely biological aging.
Now you might protest: solving these root causes is likely to cost a lot more than €10 million. And I would agree. So consider instead the possibility that your €10 million, spent well, could catalyse a whole lot more expenditure. The results of your own spending could alter people’s hearts and minds, around the world, which would in turn unleash a cascade of greater funding.
That’s what I want to explore. It’s the possibility that biological aging could be defeated, in the not-too-distant future, if society decides to apply sufficient resources for that goal. These resources would enable the development and deployment of low-cost high-quality rejuvenation treatments, available for everyone. In other words, a profoundly humanitarian outcome, removing vast amounts of human decline, degradation, frailty, pain, and suffering.
I realise that I’ve lost some of you by now. You may protest that solving biological aging isn’t possible, or that it’s somehow ethically wrong. But I suspect that, even in that case, there’s some interest, somewhere in the back of your mind, as to what it would take to create a world freed from biological aging. And if it turns out that spending €10 million wisely could hasten the arrival of such a world, maybe you’ll permit yourself to change your mind.
So, how could €10 million best be spent, to accelerate a societal tipping point, that would bring about a successful war on aging? People have different ideas on that question. I’m going to run through nine different ideas. Please let me know, in the comments, which one you would pick.
Option 1: Help develop special economic zones, sometimes called longevity states, that will encourage and support greater innovation with rejuvenation therapies, faster than is possible under existing FDA regulations and procedures.
Option 2: Target politicians, to get them to change their minds about the desirability of using public funds and resources to tackle biological aging; this could involve public Open Letters and petitions, or sharing research with politicians in language that is legislation-friendly.
Option 3: A more general coordinated public communications campaign, with improved messaging, including memes, songs, short stories, documentaries, wiki articles, Netflix series, and so on.
Option 4: A campaign targeted instead at High Net Worth Individuals – people with billions at their disposal – to push them beyond what’s been called the billionaires’ paradox, in which most billionaires fail to invest in the kind of research that could significantly extend the lifespans and healthspans of them and their family and friends.
Option 5: Efforts to transform existing healthspan initiatives, such as the “Don’t Die” project of Bryan Johnson, so that these initiatives move beyond lifestyle changes and instead support significant research into deeper rejuvenation treatments.
Option 6: Carry out rejuvenation experiments on relatively short-lived animals, such as mice, dogs, or C. elegans worms, where the results could be dramatic in just a few years.
Option 7: Support research into alternative theories of aging and rejuvenation, such as organ replacement and body replacement, or the body’s electrome.
Option 8: Don’t bother with any biological research, but plough the entire €10 million into improving AI systems, with the expectation that these AI systems will soon outpace human researchers in being able to solve aging.
Option 9: Provide a prize fund, with prizes being awarded to the individuals or teams who submit the best ideas for how to accelerate the comprehensive defeat of aging.
But which of the nine options would you personally choose? Or would you spend the money in yet another different way? Please let me know what you think!
My own choice, since you asked, would be for option 6, since I believe €10 million is likely to be sufficient to fund experiments with combination rejuvenation treatments for middle-aged mice, over the next 2-3 years, that could double the remaining lifespan of these mice. That’s similar to giving treatments to humans aged 50, and changing their expected lifespan from 80 years to 110 years. Wouldn’t that make the world sit up?
By the way, if you prefer a video version of this article, here it is:
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