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19 September 2006

Investing in the long term

San Francisco investor Peter A. Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) is putting $3.5 million into the antiaging research pioneered by TED speaker Aubrey de Grey (see past posts on him). The money will come in annual installments of $500,000 over the next three years for a pilot project, plus matching money for every dollar donated by others to de Grey's foundation.

It is not known whether there are strings attached to the donation. It seems to us, however, that consistency with the scope of de Grey's research would have Thiel transfer the money in installments of, say, $10 a day over the next 1000 years.

Posted by Bruno Giussani | | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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  • aubrey – September 25 2006

    The unconditional donation is actually only $500k total over the three years, i.e. $167k per year. It is this money that will be mainly used to fund research on preserving mitochondrial function. The remaining $3m will be spent on a broad range of projects spanning the SENS (see www.sens.org) panel of projects. There are no strings attached to either the $500k or the $3m, other than that the $3m is a 1:2 matching pledge as described above.



    $10/year would have been, um, less effective!

  • Methuselah Foundation – September 19 2006

    Hi - The matching fund is 1:2 so that every donation dollar is matched w/0.50.



    The Methuselah Foundation will primarily use the funds to focus on improving the integrity of and repairing mitochondrial function.


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