Moonshot Project To End Aging

Breaking the task down into a series of sequential steps:

(1) Now, we need to start collecting statements in favor of such a project among NIA and NIH scientists, but of course not only among them.
Invite them to join our team. As the number of statements and people in our team grows, as the project matures, we will get further statements of support from new scientists (and others).
(2) The goal of (1) is to make the request for Moonshot Project to end Aging to be the oficial position of the NIA and subsequently the NIH.
(3) When expert community is on our side, we can convince everyone else much easier, including the Congress Members, in the first place.

How I can help in collecting support statements from scientists?

There are many ways to help in that:
1) directly ask scientists, f.e. in Twitter or Facebook. Begin with scientists who already support our ideas.
We also can ask scientists (and other people) in Twitter to make a tweet in support of the launch of the Manhattan Project on Aging, with one of our hashtags. And collect all these tweets on some page.
2) make a good website like https://sites.google.com/view/longevitynow/home to show expert support statements and other information on RLE topic
3) create a database of scientists in Twitter and Facebook, with rating reflecting the probability that scientist accepts our suggestion to make a positive statement, so we ask scientists with top probability first and other when there are many scientists who participated.
4) directly ask other people to make their support statements for #MoonshotProjectToEndAging
5) while it's hard to prepare any concrete document on that Moonshot project, we still shall try to do at least what we can. We shall see how that was when War on Cancer was launched.
6) read the books on other similar super-projects like War on Cancer, to better understand how such achievements can be made.

Roughly, how the Moonshot Project might look like?

In general terms,
1) Directions: growing organs (bioprinting, in animals, from organoids, etc); artificial organs; gradual replacement of brain tissue; senolytics; mitoaging; ECM stiffening; large-scale interventions effect on biomarkers research and analysis with AI; vaccines; epigenetics; research on successful unfreezing of cryogenically preserved mouses, primates, then humans. Etc.
2) Funding: Allocate at least 1% of USA budget (~$44B) annually. Exact distribution within spheres will be decided later, maybe with a special commission or poll
3) increasing the number of specialists trained in the relevant fields at universities and even starting from schools.
4) special training programs for scientists, programmers etc who are willing to join the project but don't have all the relevant skills yet
Of course, though I speak about USA, the same can (and must) be applied for any country.

How the initial pilot stage of the Moonshot Project might look like?

The Moonshot Project might get started with several most severely neglected subprojects.

For example, there is an urgent need for an institute to develop reversible cryonization technologies. The task is to reverse cryonize first a mouse, then a primate, then a human. Grant budget - say up to $300k/PhD per year. Total budget depends on the number of grant applications submitted, in the range of $1bn/year.

Institute on cleavage of extracellular matrix crosslinks is also urgently needed. Similar scheme, a bunch of materials are available from the RLE group.

Other possible directions include:
- Hebert on gradual brain replacement
- combinatorial therapy for aging.
- AI analysis of biomarker changes under interventions, with the goal of then asking AI to find optimal interventions.
- etc

We can gather opinions from scientists on which of these areas to launch, with what grant budget and overall budget.

Why we shall begin with convincing the NIA/NIH community?

What is easier?
(1) Convince the community of ~300k[1] NIH researchers, including (~30k?) NIA researchers
(2) Convince the community of ~300M USA citizens
(3) Convince 535 Members of Congress

Certainly,
1) convincing just 300k clever people is obviously easier and faster than convincing 1000x more people.
2) it's really hard now to convince ordinary people because of insufficient experts support.
3) It's good idea to find people most prone to our ideas among ordinary people. But as for the most of other people, they wouldn't believe you too much unless you show them large scale expert support for our position. When you finally find all those say 50 people in the city who are willing to help us sometimes it becomes harder to attract other people. It's hard to convince the whole city, they are ordinary people after all, they are not really into science or politics, they believe experts and most of experts now are silent, with a very few supporting us and very few opposing us.

I would also say that among those 300k researchers, at least 10k are already ready to agree with us. Just everyone has their own threshold of support statements of other scientists after which he or she is ready to publish their support statement.

So we have two main tasks:
1. find and organize longevity activists for this work
2. convince 300k scientists of NIH

See also

Open letters calling for an all-out war on aging
Vitalism movement
FAQ on Moonshot Project To End Aging (not much info yet)
"The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
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