Sponsors & Advisors

Mprize Scientific Advisory Board

In June 2008 we had our first official meeting of the new Mprize Scientific Advisory Board and great discussions ensued. The MPSAB is one of core components of the Mprize and the value of having the experience and engagement of these individuals is clear. These are gentlemen who couple their expertise with the effective influence of a competitive prize to help push the need for aging research into the mainstream. Not everyone was able to make this inaugural event, but we look forward to having everyone in the same room in the future.

Board Members

• Andrzej Bartke PhD - Co-Chair
• Craig Cooney PhD - Co-Chair
• Don Ingram PhD
• Tom Johnson PhD
• Christiaan Leeuwenburgh PhD
• John Speakman PhD
• Steven Spindler PhD
• Huber Warner PhD
  

Resource Advisors

These are the individuals who have been with the Mprize from the beginning and we thank them for lending their assistance and help in those formative days when it was so crucial and without which we would never have made it this far.  A debt of gratitude to these individuals is owed.

• Steve Austad
  Dr. Austad is at now at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio.
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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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• Russ Hepple
  Dr. Hepple is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
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• Rick Weindruch
  Dr. Weindruch is a Professor at the Department of Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Original Sponsors

• Dr. Peter Greenman
• Diana Stackhouse

Non-Science Advisors

• 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.
  
  

• 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 trends 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.

  
  
• 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.

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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 Mprize:

• 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 Mprize 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.
  
• The late Chris Heward's encouragement in Maui in April 2001 allowed Aubrey de Grey to come up with the formula for how much of the prize fund a winner receives.
• The late 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.
  

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