What You Can Do By Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Methuselah Foundation Chairman and Chief Science Officer

This is one of my five FAQ ("Frequently-Asked Questions") pages: it covers queries about how one can help the SENS effort. The other FAQ pages respond to:

• general challenges to the 'credibility' of SENS,
• criticisms of how I'm going about making SENS a reality,
• concerns that defeating aging is a bad idea or at least a low priority, and
• questions about how long people of what current age may live.

Note: even though there are links to separate items below, I recommend reading this page straight through from start to finish.

1. Doing the science

   IF YOU'RE AN UNDERGRADUATE, GRAD STUDENT OR CURRENT POSTDOC IN BIOLOGY/MEDICINE: We badly need biologists to work on the various aspects of SENS. There are not many professors who are willing to focus explicitly on defeating aging, but there are plenty who are happy to supervise important projects that are interesting for scientific reasons and also have anti-aging potential. In general we have had great success by finding really committed young scientists who will join a laboratory with the right expertise and resources and will drive a SENS project forward without getting distracted by the short-term goals of getting as many publications as possible.

   If you'd like to apply to do SENS research, please email me and tell me a bit about yourself; enclose your CV, and describe any current academic obligations (such as an ongoing PhD) and the amount of time you could commit to SENS work. Also please mention if there are any aspects of the SENS program that you'd be particularly well-qualified to work on, or where you have existing relevant experience.

   Current students should also visit the MF Undergraduate Research Initiative website to find out how you can work on SENS research as part of your degree.

2. Developing the science

   IF YOU'RE A BIOLOGIST: read my papers on the technologies we need to develop in order to defeat aging. If you think I'm being too optimistic in those papers, read the key experimental work that I cite and see if that changes your mind. Also, listen and read about the conferences: the IABG 10, that I ran in September 2003,  SENS 2, which occurred in September 2005 and was if anything even better than IABG10, and the most recent successful SENS 3. If you're still skeptical, email me to say why -- you might be right, but I deserve the chance to hear your reasons! Conversely, if you're inspired to work in any of these areas, email me so that I can put you in touch with others who are working on the same topic.

3. Learning to see biology as an engineer

   IF YOU'RE AN ENGINEER, COMPUTER SCIENTIST, ETC: learn some biology. I started making really well-received contributions to biogerontology after I'd been reading the literature for TWO MONTHS - no kidding. Maybe I was lucky, but maybe it was just that scientists really need input from people with a different training and mindset. Don't take the easy way out of thinking that you can't help because you haven't got the right expertise. The best way for someone with mathematical or computer training to get into biology is just to dive in and not be scared of how many facts there are. Start with a graduate-level cell biology textbook, such as "Molecular Biology of the Cell" by Alberts et al. (If the phrase "graduate-level" scares you, another book by some of the same authors and targeted at undergraduates may be a good stepping stone: it's called "Essential Cell Biology" and it has been highly praised.)

   It's important to learn masses of biology - certainly the whole of graduate-level animal biology - because aging is a chaotic interaction of lots of system failures going on all together and you won't understand it well enough to make a useful contribution if you only understand selected bits of how we work when we're young. If you want to go back to college and get seriously educated in the relevant fields, that means that at undergraduate level you should aim for the most general biology course, covering all aspects of animal biology - genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, physiology, the lot.

4. Solving biology's greatest computational problem

   IF YOU'RE IN CHARGE OF A LOT OF CPU CYCLES: use them to contribute to the effort to predict protein structure from sequence (the "protein folding problem"). There are various distributed projects doing this; look here and here for more details.

5. Publicising SENS

   IF YOU'RE A JOURNALIST: write about my work - but most importantly of all please interview other mainstream biogerontologists (the more senior and high-profile the better) and ask them to explain why they don't think we'd cure aging any time soon by the approach I advocate. And also listen to the talks from IABG 10 , SENS 2, and SENS 3.

   WHOEVER YOU ARE: add a link to sens.org to your email signature file! This sort of advertising really gets noticed.

6. Donating to SENS research

   IF YOU WANT TO HELP FUND SENS RESEARCH: read about the proposed Institute of Biomedical Gerontology (IBG) and contribute to SENS research funding, which will eventually support the IBG and is already supporting SENS research around the world.

7. Donating to the Methuselah Mouse Prize

   IF YOU WANT TO HELP FUND LIFE EXTENSION RESEARCH IN GENERAL: contribute to the Methuselah Mouse Prize fund. No amount is too small! -- the number of individual donors is just as important as the size of the prize fund, in terms of showing public support for this effort.

8. Donate for free!

   IF YOU SHOP ONLINE: Via the GoodShop website, you can make purchases at a wide range of online stores (including such well-known sites as Amazon, eBay, HSN, iTunes, Expedia and many others) and a portion of the money you spend will be donated to the Methuselah Foundation. The amount you pay doesn't change - the retailer pays a commission to GoodShop for pointing you to their store, and GoodSearch redirects this money straight to the Foundation!
   
   If you're looking for books on the topic of life extension, then you can purchase these through the Foundation's hosted Amazon store, in which case an even greater fraction of the purchase price is redirected to us.

9. Linking to this site

   IF YOU HAVE A WEBSITE, A BLOG, ETC: link to my site, spread the word to sites more popular than your own, do all the things a web site is good for.

10. Promoting SENS to friends/colleagues/family

    WHOEVER YOU ARE: talk to your friends/family/colleagues about what life would be like without aging and find out what they don't like about the idea. Get better at rebutting their arguments. You'll find that they will very quickly realise they have no arguments, but then it gets harder, because they will try to change the subject. Don't let them get away with this. Read my reasons why I claim people should be working now to cure aging as soon as possible, and email me if there are ways in which you think they can be improved or added to. In fact, you're welcome to contact me with any suggestions you may have for how the SENS effort can be expedited, whether by improvements to this site, activities of the Methuselah Foundation, whatever.

IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE FITTING ANY OF THE ABOVE DESCRIPTIONS: why are you still reading? Go and tell them what they can do to help, and make sure they do it!

IF YOU'RE NONE OF THE ABOVE: well, become something! You will be surprised that achieving goals gets much easier and much more fun, once you are personally fully motivated for something and understand why you are.