Interested in getting in on some big cash prizes but don?t have the sequencing capacity or rocketry experience to compete in the more well known X-prize competitions If you?re good with mice, all you might need is time. In putting together the March feature on aging by S. Jay Olshansky and colleagues we came across the Methuselah Mouse Prize or M-prize. Funded by private donors, the M-prize is brainchild of Aubrey de Grey, the Cambridge geneticist who contends that with proper maintenance (yet undiscovered), humans could live for hundreds or even thousands of years. The prize is awarded in two categories that have been variously named over the years but currently go by longevity and rejuvenation.

The longevity prize rewards researchers that have bred, engineered, or otherwise reared the longest living mouse, and the prize amount is a percentage of the total prize fund available calculated by how much one beats the current record by. If you can double the current record of 1,819 days, you can capture half the available funds, currently $3.3 million. Rejuvenation rewards published longevity intervention experiments comprising test and control groups larger than 20 and starting on mice that are at least half the mean age of death for the control group. The current prize holder had six mice of 60 live to an average of 1356 days.

Though de Grey and Olshansky are often pitted against one another in the media for their differing views on what constitutes a reasonable life extension goal, Olshansky has said that at least de Grey promotes the science of age extension through such projects. If I can wake up early enough to catch the web stream from the U.S., I hope to hear the both of them talk March 15 at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization World Forum meeting in Oxford.