“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine
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Those of you who are space geeks like me will be familiar with the X-Prize, which helped move space tourism (and cheap space flight generally) from being a great idea to being a reality that is in the process of being constructed.
Now the Methuselah Foundation, which is dedicated to extending healthy human life, has initiated the New Organ Prize (embedded video below).
The prize has two categories.
One is for banking organs: the winner must preserve a complex organ for 30 days — thousands of people die because the best we can do now is less than a day.
The other is for creating organs: the winner must build a complex whole organ from a person’s cells, transplant it, and have it function for two years.
As with the original X-Prize, the New Organ Prize is set at $10 million. And the fact is that X-Prize competitors were sufficiently incentivized with that prize for many of the teams to spend far more than $10 million on their projects.
Prizes like this — when combined with prestige and the prospect of future profits from new technologies — appear to be enough, in at least in some cases, to spawn teams that will meet the project’s goal.
