Abstract
“There is so little time for us all; I need to be able to say what I want quickly and to as many people as possible.”
I
But there are a few questions that I like being asked repeatedly, because they are really questions to other people, lightly disguised as questions to me. Perhaps the most important one, and the one on which I will focus here, is: why do so few wealthy technophiles donate to SENS Research Foundation?
In 2006, when Peter Thiel publicly committed to supporting my work to the tune of $3.5 million, I made what to this day is still by far my biggest error of overoptimism in this crusade, far exceeding any on the actual science: I concluded that the heavy lifting of my fundraising task was complete. Peter was riding particularly high at that time, not only technologically but as an investor, and I felt absolutely certain that those like him—not all of them, of course, but quite enough of them—would be lining up to follow his lead. It didn't happen. It was 4 more years before Jason Hope stepped up as our second seven-digit donor, and even longer thereafter before number three.
And this was not for lack of exposure of the relevant audience to my message. One gets a rather predictably low hit-rate when writing letters to high net worth individuals asking for philanthropic support, but I did not need to rely on that: thanks to the help of many key opinion-formers, most notably Chris Anderson of TED fame, I had the opportunity over that period to engage in extensive conversations with many—in fact, I can go as far as to say most—of the people who will spring most rapidly to your mind when you hear the phrase “wealthy technophile.” And sure enough, most of those to whom I spoke expressed great enthusiasm for what I said. With their mouths, that is—but not their checkbooks. How come?
My answer, in a nutshell, is “every billionaire is different, and almost no billionaire is an island.” Some of them genuinely don't see that aging is as big a problem as it actually is, but for the most part the reasons are less fundamental. They think their spouse would disapprove. They think their friends would laugh at them. They think their company's share price would be impacted by accusations that they are treating science fiction as fact. And so on.
Which brings me to the children of the revolution.
As is well known, in 2011 I donated to SENS Research Foundation 78% of the roughly $16.5 million that I inherited that year on my mother's death. We made the decision to spend that windfall at a rate of about $2.5 million per year over the years 2012 through 2016, thus letting us get plenty done while at the same time giving us time to build up our fundraising efforts so that new money would exist to replace it when it ran out. In practice, though our grassroots intake (defined to be from those donating less than $100k per year) rose by an order of magnitude, we made basically no progress during those years in increasing our “major donor” base—and moreover, Jason Hope stopped donating and Peter Thiel progressively reduced his contribution. It is no exaggeration to say that we were in serious danger of having to close down the bulk of our research efforts. Our runway was extended through 2017 mainly by two lifelines: Peter re-upped to a $1 million donation, and in mid-2016 we welcomed a new $1 million/year donor in the form of Michael Greve. We also benefited from a few six-digit donations. But we were still living very much on the edge, not least because the rise in grassroots income since 2012 had leveled off.
My firm belief over the past few years has been that the only way we would paddle our way out of the crisis was with the help of investment—which I mean in the narrow sense of for-profit contributions. The mission has for sure begun in earnest to benefit from investment: we can already boast the existence of five successful startup companies that we have in one way or another spawned, and a host of others have emerged in parallel, fueled by an explosion of interest from investors with seriously deep pockets or serious influence or both. But I always knew, and still know, that that is not enough. The day will come when the nonprofit SENS Research Foundation can declare victory in its mission to kick-start the creation of the rejuvenation biotechnology industry—when the private sector is pursuing all aspects of this crusade with sufficient energy to ensure its timely success—but that day is still some way off. And until it arrives, we need donations. The most major investors in our space are, for the most part, seeing the truth of this logic and are donating to SENS as well as investing, but (with the prominent exception of Michael Greve) the ratio of the two is still tilted too far to the investment side.
But then came Christmas. And it was sure some Christmas for us. We received four seven-digit donations in the space of a month, totaling $6.5 million. As a result, our finances are now healthy and we are resuming our consideration of vital new projects. The future is bright. I was wrong: it now seems that we do not need to resign ourselves to being dragged in the inevitably more short-termist for-profit direction, thereby endangering the progress of the equally vital but more technically challenging components of SENS that are not yet seen as investable even by the most visionary, high-risk-high-reward-centric angels.
What changed? The answer may be surprising; it sure surprised me. The donations were all in cryptocurrency—but that's not really the point. The point is that, insofar as we know, they came from donors in their 20s. One was Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old creator of Ethereum, who had already given us $250k a year earlier but who upped that in December by a factor of 10. Another, whose identity I know but cannot reveal, is of a similar age. The identities of the other two are unknown even to me—blockchain makes that possible, of course—but one of them announced his/her donation to us (and to a raft of other charities) on Reddit, which at least circumstantially suggests a similar age.
You may still be wondering why this has got me so excited that I wrote an editorial about it. Simple: I have a fair understanding, not least from Vitalik telling me, of what has happened. People in their 20s were in their teens when Ending Aging was published, and when I became prominent as the first person to offer a logical case for why we have a good shot at remaining youthful indefinitely. Truly they are the children of the revolution, in the sense that they have never needed to question and reject a previously-held view that aging is natural, inevitable, and a blessing in disguise. They simply grew up already seeing and knowing the obvious truth that aging is the world's worst problem and is amenable to medical intervention.
Those 20-somethings are coming to the fore. A few of them are already wealthy, and SENS is already benefiting. More of the same is still urgently needed. So I say this to the wealthy 40-somethings and older who have hitherto lacked the courage to follow that path and who are reading this: well, it's not too late. It may or may not be too late for you to benefit personally, but you can increase your own odds in only one way: by hastening this research. Follow those who have, in other ways, followed you.