Methuselah Mouse Prize Administration
Sponsors
- Dr. Peter Greenman
- Diana Stackhouse
Scientific Advisors
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Steve Austad
Dr. Austad is at now at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio. (home page information is still at U of Idaho)
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Andrzej Bartke
Dr. Bartke is a Professor at the Department of Physiology, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.
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Russ Hepple
Dr. Hepple is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
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Tom Kirkwood
Dr. Kirkwood is Professor of Medicine at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Newcastle, UK.
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Steve Spindler
Dr. Spindler is a Professor at the Department of Biochemistry, University of California at Riverside.
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Rick Weindruch
Dr. Weindruch is a Professor at the Department of Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Non-Science Advisors
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Peter Diamandis
Dr. Diamandis is the Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation , a non-profit organization promoting the formation of a space-tourism industry through a $10M prize. He was a co-founder of Space Adventures, Ltd. , a leading space travel and tourism company, and a co-Founder and chairman of Starport.com, a leading Internet site for Space Exploration, acquired by SPACE.com in 1990.
In 1987, Peter co-founded the International Space University (ISU) where he served as the University's first managing director. Today he is a trustee of the $30M university located on its own campus in Strasbourg, France. While a student at MIT, Peter founded and served as chairman of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), the world's largest student space organization.
Peter Diamandis received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in aerospace engineering from the MIT and a medical degree from Harvard Medical School. He has conducted research in a number of fields, including molecular genetics, space medicine, and launch vehicle design. He has received a number of awards, including MIT's Kresge Award, the 1986 Space Industrialization Fellowship Award, the 1988 Aviation Week and Space Technology Laurel, the 1993 Space Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, and the Russian 1995 K. E. Tsiolkovsky Award. to work.
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Roger Holzberg
Vice President & Creative Director for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online (WDPRO).
Roger serves as WDPRO's "Brand Champion," providing creative oversight for all projects to ensure delivery of the highest quality creative work. Roger is involved in all aspects of the creative process including brand immersion, project conceptualization, Brand and Management presentations, and the final delivery of web and attraction-based projects. He also directs live action sequences as needed and works with senior management to develop the WDPRO creative vision for the future.
Since joining WDPRO from Walt Disney Imagineering, Roger's role has grown from handling the online web sites to directing our Advanced Projects initiatives, including interactive marketing and integrated online theme park attractions. Roger has a hands-on creative leadership role in all aspects of our advanced projects, from interactive and online to dimensional design, attraction integration and media production.
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Andrew Zolli
Z + Partners was founded by Andrew Zolli in 2001.
Andrew is a forecaster, design strategist and author, working at the intersection of culture, creativity, technology, and futures research. Andrew specializes in helping people and institutions see, understand and act upon complex change. He is also the Contributing Futurist at Popular Science magazine, and a regular contributor to Wired Magazine and NPR's Marketplace. He is also the Chair of the annual Pop!Tech conference.
Most recently, Andrew was the editor of the Catalog of Tomorrow, (QUE Publishing, 2002) which explores 100 trend and technologies for the next 25 years. His next book, In Good Company, about the complex relationship between companies and culture, will be published in 2004.
Andrew is the former Chief Marketing Officer of one of the world's leading brand and strategy consultancies, Siegel & Gale, where he helped develop new designs, businesses, products and services for companies such as The Weather Channel, Netscape, Kodak, American Express, AT&T, Toys R Us, Silicon Graphics, Lucent, Hewlett Packard, Forrester Research, Sappi, T. Rowe Price, The Industry Standard, and IBM, among many others. While at Siegel & Gale, Andrew was also instrumental in creating the CRAVE Conference, a design event exploring the nature of and craft of compelling design experiences.
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Harvey Ardman
Harvey Ardman, Pop!Tech's Program Director, has written 18 books, including two spy novels, a popular history and the "autobiography of Jose Greco". He's also contributed to American Heritabe, Esquire and many other magazines. In addition, he's written more than two dozen TV documentaries for PBS, The Discovery Channel and Turner Broadcasting.
Acknowledgements
In addition to our advisors , our sponsors and of course our donors , we are indebted to the following people who were involved in various ways in inspiring the MMP:
- Gregory Stock conceived the first prize for research into aging, the Prometheus Prize . This is still a twinkle in his eye, but we earnestly hope that the MMP will bring it to fruition.
- Richard Cutler was the first to discuss the idea of a prize for long-lived mice.
- Don Ingram came up with the prize's name.
- Chris Heward bought Aubrey de Grey enough beers in Maui in April 2001 to allow him to come up with the formula for how much of the prize fund a winner receives.
- Roy Walford had the idea to use aspartate racemisation as the method for validating the age of a claimed record-breaker.
- The idea of using mouse life extension as a way of exploring the biology of mammalian aging in general, and in particular as a precursor to the development of human life-extension therapies, greatly predates the idea of promoting such work with prizes. Harman fed mice antioxidants as the first tests of his Free Radical Theory of Aging in the 1950s; Weindruch and Walford, among others, explored the extremes of what could be done to mouse lifespan by caloric restriction, and others, including academic (Cutler) and commercial (Aeiveos, led by Bradbury) efforts, explored the creation of multiply transgenic mice engineered to slow diverse aspects of the aging process.