I in no way mean this as an attack on the Methuselah Mouse Prize, but I thought it would be helpful information in evaluating the worth of creating a Fly Prize.
You should start by checking out the following articles at
Fight Aging!, which I will butcher here as I attempt to paraphrase:
The Cost of SENShttp://www.fightagin...ives/000256.phpHow Big a Research Prize to Fund SENS?http://www.fightagin...ives/000257.phpHow to Fund a $62.5 Million Research Prizehttp://www.fightagin...ives/000258.phpThe third article there, as you can see from it's title, talks about how big the Methuselah Mouse Prize needs to get. In order to produce the level of research required to achieve a SENS-like program in mice, the MMP would need to reach about 60 million dollars.
Now we can argue this figure as much as we want
: there are good arguments to suppose that the figure needs to be even more, and good arguments to suppose that it could be quite a bit less. Suffice it to say, when Dr. de Grey et al. have suggested that the prize fund needs to reach at least 5 to 10 million dollars, they are definitely stating a *minimum* figure, and for the prize to have any serious impact (e.g. speeding up the relevant research by five to ten years), the prize may even need to reach a hundred million dollars. After all, let's face it, if you're contemplating spending a billion dollars of company assets, a $50 million prize that you might not even win is not really much of a bait.
Now, on the flipside of this, we have the proposed Fly Prize. While the basic goal is the same, the entire equation is reduced by orders of magnitude. Prometheus has done a good job already of
exposing a few of the cost differences. Here's an
alternate link to some of the same information, in case the first link doesn't work. Here's an
extract from one of his posts about the costs involved in running lab experiments with mice:
...I am painfully aware of the expenditure involved. It costs about US$50,000 per 4 months to hire some space in a molecular biology university lab with a post-grad doing the routine work and a couple of assistant professor level academics to help design and overview the data gathering exercise. This does not include the cost of lab animal upkeep or any special and expensive reagents. As wild type mice have a lifespan of 3 years and genetically altered enhanced mice up to 5 years the cost of this exercise could require as much as US$500,000.
When it comes to flies, we're not talking about a billion dollars in research money. At best, a few million, and at worst, a few tens of millions. And that's total, across all projects. Individual projects can be run for a few hundred thousand (or less, depending on the type of equipment already available).
After all, we're not aiming at tackling all the diverse processes that need to be tamed, as we are with mice. With flies, we're simply looking to enhance what Evolution has already built in to their genome. Single genes have already been found that can double their lifespan, a feat not yet achieved in mice with all our technology. But very little is known about what combinations of techniques will be effective, and how this knowledge will apply to humans. In fact, we haven't even identified all the relevant genes!
Now let's take a big number, like $10 million. At the 16:1 ratio that Reason is quoting in his articles, we're talking about needing a Fly Prize of about $625,000 dollars, only about 25% more than what the Mouse Prize has
already! Now granted, the Mouse Prize will be collecting the bulk of that money through 25-year pledges, and the Fly Prize by its very nature doesn't lend itself to a pledge period of more than about ten years. Nonetheless, the current funds of the Mouse Prize plus the first ten years of its pledges puts it at roughly a quarter of a million dollars, about 40% of what the Fly Prize would need to be "successful". On the other hand, the Mouse Prize, at roughly a half million, currently stands at less than 1% of what it needs!
Like I said, I'm not bashing the Mouse Prize. It will continue to grow, hopefully exponentially once it hits a million and starts getting taken "seriously" by the public. But I'm asking for people here to honestly take a look at why they're against the Fly Prize, and evaluate if those reasons are good ones. I know that it's tempting to aim for the stars, but from a cost-benefit standpoint, the Fly Prize seems like a no-brainer.
