The Methuselah Foundation needs your help: we are supporting a project named “Undergrads Against Age Related Disease,” submitted as part of the Amex Members Project initiative. In order to move forward, this project must obtain more than 2000 votes in the next 2 weeks – by September 1st, 2008.

You can help by voting: it’s free and won’t take more than a few minutes. We just need you to go to the Members Projects website and nominate the “Undergrads Against Age Related Disease” project. You don’t need to be an Amex card holder, but you do need to be a US resident.

Here are the voting instructions for US residents:

1. Go to this website: http://www.membersproject.com/

2.a. If you are not an Amex Card Member: Click on “Guest Members Log In” in the upper right corner of the screen. Then click on “Guest Members Sign Up Here” at the bottom of the next screen.

2.b. If you are an Amex Card Member: Click on “Cardmembers Log In” on the right side of the screen. If you don’t already have an online login click on “Create a Log In” in the next screen.

3. Complete the Registration Form which will give you your Login ID.

4. Once you are logged in on the home page, you can either a) Enter “Undergrads Fighting Age Related Disease” in the Search box or b) click on “Health ” then “Diseases and Disorders” at the bottom right of the home page, and scroll down to “Undergrads Fighting Age Related Disease”. Alternately, here is a direct link to the project page:

http://www.membersproject.com/project/view/BVVE2C

5. Click on the project and then click on the “Nominate this Project” button. Then click on “Post Your Comments” at the bottom of the screen to have your say, as discussion board activity counts towards the nomination of the top 25 projects.

Thank you for your help!

The Methuselah Mouse Prize (or Mprize) is the premiere effort of The Methuselah Foundation; a scientific competition in mouse longevity designed to draw attention to the ability of new technologies to slow and even reverse the damage of the aging process. Today we’d like to draw your attention to the Mprize Scientific Advisory Board – the folk who have been helping to make the Mprize for longevity research a success.

This year in June 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.

The board has become something of a who’s who for early initiatives in engineering mouse longevity – just the way it should be in order to further expand efforts to increase healthy life spans in mice using technologies that may later be applied to humans.

Methuselah Foundation chair Aubrey de Grey was recently interviewed for an episode of the Discovery Channel series NextWorld, which begins airing in the US on Wednesday, August 6th. The episode that covers the path forward for longevity science will air later in the series, but a shorter version of the interview will be included in the first episode, called Future Life on Earth.

From the series description: “NextWorld explores some of the most amazing technologies, science, ideas and trends that we will encounter over the next 20 years. From cities that float to functional exoskeletons, digital contact lenses to pills that promise to greatly extend our lifespans – the stories speak to some of the amazing things happening in the world of science thanks to what we refer to as the ‘technology avalanche’ now occurring.”