Build a better mouse: of mice, men, and aging.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Citings - The Methuselah mouse prize has many baby boomers showing an interest - Brief Article

FORGET THE X Prize. What's so great about sending a couple of people 100 kilometers up in the sky? The Methuselah Mouse Prize has a more interesting goal: getting a mouse to have an unusually long and healthy life.

The prize is named after Methuselah--the longest-lived human being, according to the Bible, which says he survived 969 years. If scientists can reliably lengthen the lives of mice, prize organizers believe, they will be well on their way to finding out how to do the same thing for people. The underlying insight is that, since 99 percent of the 30,000 or so mouse genes have direct counterparts in humans, we are in one narrow sense just big mice.

The Methuselah Mouse Prize is chiefly the brainchild of Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical biogerontologist at Cambridge University. The Methuselah Foundation offers two prizes. One is the Postponement Prize, awarded whenever the world record life span for a mouse is exceeded. The second one is the Reversal Prize, awarded to researchers whose interventions keep a mature mouse alive significantly longer than expected. (The ordinary...