I leave for Aruba tonight (overnight flight). By the time I come back I will be 21. That means I will never be denied the right to gamble or drink ever again because of age. It feels like an eternity has passed, and I’m just about to begin my poker career.

I made a post a while ago saying that I was going to donate a small percent of my live tournament winnings to a charity. I have been criticized some at 2 2 for saying this and “not following through”, but I haven’t played a single live tournament since January. I assure you, I am a man of my word.

I have researched many charities, and I knew that I wanted to sponsor a charity that will make a long term difference. Also, thanks to Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey (see my earlier blog about Kurzweil), I have some pretty radical views about the future, and I wanted to pick a charity in line with this.

I did some research to see what causes Kurzweil endorses, and I found the Methuselah Foundation. Aubrey de Grey is the Chairman and Chief Science Officer, as well as a co-founder of the foundation. For those of you not familiar with the name, Methuselah was a man that supposedly lived to be 969 years old. The name is very appropriate, as the Methuselah foundation is trying to fight the aging process.

They have several different projects. The most interesting is the Mprize fund which I believe currently has around $3,000,000. The prize is for a contest. It is open to anyone with the means to compete. The idea is to take a common house mouse (specifically Mus musculus), and to have it live as long as possible. In the wild, they generally live under a year, but can often live up to three years if they are removed from the threat of predators. Thanks to the Mprize, there was a genetically engineered Mus musculus that lived to be 1819 days.

The prize is set up so that anyone who breaks the world record of the longest living Mus musculus will receive a portion of the prize. There is a simple formula setup, where the amount of the prize you receive is based on how much you beat the previous world record for. For example, if you double the world record, you will receive roughly half of the prize pool. This way, the prize pool will never fully deplete, and there will always be motivation for people to compete.

The Methuselah foundation also sponsors SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). This is currently believed to be the best route to combat aging. SENS only looks at one specific method, so the Mprize is a good way to make sure all strategies are looked at.

About a week ago, Peter A. Thiel (co-founder and former CEO of PayPal) pledged $3,500,000 to SENS research. $500,000 will be payed outright, and the remaining $3,000,000 will match 50% of other pledges. In other words, if I were to pledge $100, Thiel would pledge another $50 to match 50% of my contribution. He will do this until the entire $3,000,000 is exhausted.

Unfortunately, I am not well versed enough in this to go into the science behind anti-aging, however, you can read about it at www.sens.org or www.mprize.org. There truly is some amazing stuff that we are on the brink of applying to humans.

I will be pledging 5% of whatever I win in Aruba (and this will continue for future tournaments I play as well) to SENS research. I would feel honored if other people were to read this post, and decide to do the same, so please, check out those two websites. The potential of this foundation is too amazing to pass up.