How to Compete
If you are conducting or planning a mouse life extension study, it is not essential for eligibility for the prize that you tell us about it at the earliest opportunity, but it is strongly in your interests (and, coincidentally, ours!) that you do so. The earlier in the experiment you contact us, the less chance there will be of our being unable to validate a claimed record-breaker to the satisfaction of our advisory board, which is a prerequisite for a payout. Further, the point of the prize is to give publicity to the best mammalian life-extension research; by registering your mice with us you and your work will be brought to the attention of a wide audience, with all the positive consequences for prestige and funding that that entails.
The mechanism for enrolling your mice, for keeping us up to date on their survival, and for claiming a prize is mainly geared to making it impossible to overstate the age of a claimed winner. While we know that cheating is incredibly unlikely, it is critical for the credibility (and thus the prestige) of the prize that competitors be seen to be unable either to cheat or to make mistakes about the age of their mice.
The only absolute requirement for eligibility for the Longevity or the Rejuvenation Prize is that you deliver your claimed winner to us, to arrive within a week of its death, in a condition that leaves no possibility that it has been dead for appreciably longer than you claim. We will then have the age of your mouse estimated by aspartate racemisation measurements of several tissues that are known not to be recycled during the mouse's lifetime. This will give us an estimate that we can be confident is not off by more than a month. If other circumstances are not in any way suspicious, we will therefore accept the age at death that you state so long as it is not more than one month older than the estimate which we get from the racemisation measurements. However, we do not specify in advance what would constitute such suspicion -- that decision is at the discretion of the advisory board at the time.
In order to maximise the confidence that there will be no such query over a claimed win, we therefore ask you to do as follows at the start of your experiment, or as soon as possible if it is already in progress:
us a table indicating, for each mouse in your experiment:
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- its unique identifier (name/number/whatever);
- its exact date of birth
- its exact date of birth
- its gender
- if it was obtained by you from elsewhere, its date of delivery to you and from where
- its background strain
- its mutant/transgenic genotype
- any intervention that you are performing on it
- Tag the mice in a manner that prevents any accidental switching of younger mice with older ones. We will accept any of the usual systems (subcutaneous microchips, tattooing, ear tags, etc), but we do require you to use some such system and to have put it in place within a short period of the start of your experiment. If the experiment has already been in progress for some time and you have not used such a system, please consult us at once and our advisors will rule on what we need you to do.
- We also ask you to notify us promptly of the death of any mouse that you have registered with us in this way, so that we can remove its details from our list of enrolled mice.
Please note that for the Rejuvenation Prize it is necessary to demonstrate that the mice had received no interventions at all, whether genetic, dietary or pharmacological, until the declared age of onset of the study at which the first intervention was begun; before this age,the mouse must be "normal". In particular, any transgenic change to a mouse (unless performed by somatic gene therapy) counts as an intervention begun at age zero, so the "nominal age" of such mice is just their actual age, whatever else you may do to them later(such as late-onset caloric restriction, for example). For interventions to be accepted as having been begun later, it is essential that you provide us with good documentary evidence that prior to that age they were not given any form of treatment that qualifies as an intervention. This is why we ask for source and date of delivery to you of mice that you did not generate yourself. Where such evidence is unavailable or not applicable, the advisory board will decide on a case-by-case basis whether your documentation suffices; again, this is most likely to be a favourable decision the earlier in the experiment you contact us.
One last thing applies when and if one of your mice gets within a month of beating the LP or RP record: we need to receive evidence that it is still in a reasonably healthy state. Our scientific advisors have ruled that this should be defined as an ability to feed itself. Therefore, when we see that a mouse that you have not yet told us is dead is within a month of beating a record, we will contact you, and having confirmed that it really is still alive we will arrange to visit your laboratory to verify the mouse's health. Thereafter, for the remaining lifetime of the mouse, we will ask you to email us a short video clip of the mouse at least once per week, demonstrating its continuing health. This may sound like a lot of trouble, but remember that it only kicks in when you're within one month of breaking the world record, so it'll be the least of your publicity time-sinks by then -- indeed, it will help you to shift the burden of dealing with the press to us to the extent that you wish.