Bacon Prize

Who will recognize the true pioneers of super longevity? The people who stand out to make an impact, who challenge the status quo to bring new science, new strategies, and a new vision of living into our world.

Who will give credit where credit is due?

This is the purpose of the Bacon Prize for Thought Leadership in Super longevity, awarded annually by the Coalition for Radical Life Extension.

Named for Roger Bacon, one of the earliest proponents of the scientific method, and Sir Francis Bacon, the Renaissance philosopher who helped establish modern scientific reasoning, the Bacon Prize is our acknowledgment of those people who have made, and continue to make, extraordinary contributions to the advancement of radical life extension.

 

The Prize

 

The Bacon prize is named for both Roger Bacon and Sir Francis Bacon, who, though they lived centuries apart, both made pioneering contributions to addressing aging as a tractable medical problem. Sir Francis Bacon is best known for having discovered and popularized the scientific method.

The Bacon Prize is awarded annually by the Coalition for Radical Life Extension to an individual in recognition of their excellence in work focused on curing aging, involving communication with both scientific and general audiences, and whose contributions have been documented and backed by peer review.

Recipients

  • 2022 Recipient - Dr. Bill Andrews

    Sierra Sciences, Founder and CEO

    Dr. Bill Andrews is the Founder and CEO of Sierra Sciences, a company focused on finding ways to extend human lifespan and health span through telomere maintenance. Telomeres are found at the tips of our chromosomes and have been shown, in thousands of scientific peer-reviewed studies, to be the clock of aging in humans. When telomeres get shorter, we get older, and our health declines.

    Bill has been a medical researcher in biotech since 1981, focusing on cancer, heart disease, and inflammation research, though his passion has always been aging. In the early-to-mid 1990s, while at Geron Corporation, Bill led the research to discover both the RNA and protein components of the human enzyme called telomerase. This enzyme is responsible for preventing telomeres from shortening in human reproductive cells, and this is why our children are born younger than we are even though they come from our old cells. Inducing this enzyme to lengthen telomeres in all our cells, not just our reproductive cells, to reverse aging and declining health due to aging, is the principal goal of Sierra Sciences.

  • 2021 Recipient - Bill Faloon

    Life Extension Foundation: Co-Founder

    Bill Faloon, along with Saul Kent, founded Life Extension® in 1980, with the goal of educating people about the latest breakthroughs in anti-aging and disease prevention. As its Technical Director, Mr. Faloon continues this mission by spearheading age-reversal research initiatives. Mr. Faloon has made hundreds of media appearances, including guest spots on “The Phil Donohue Show,” “Tony Brown's Journal” and ABC News “Day One,” and he has been interviewed by Newsweek and other magazines. The author of Pharmocracy: How Corrupt Deals and Misguided Medical Regulations Are Bankrupting America – and What to Do About It, Mr. Faloon also is a contributing author and editor of Disease Prevention and Treatment: Scientific Protocols That Integrate Mainstream and Alternative Medicine, now in its sixth edition.

  • 2020 Recipient - Dr. Aubrey de Grey

    Gerontologist and activist

    Perhaps the leading spokesman for curing aging at work today, Dr. Aubrey De Grey has helped to advance the conversation from a niche idea among outliers to a far more mainstream topic. De Grey’s Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence presented a framework of proposed regenerative therapies to repair age-related damage. This has provided vital scientific plausibility to our movement and has made super longevity far more accessible and acceptable in the culture at large. De Grey not only theorized but he took action as well, co-founding the SENS Research Foundation. Through De Grey’s leadership, SENS has funded millions of dollars of research, and serves as a focal point for the radical life extension movement.

  • 2019 Recipient - Dr. Michael R. Rose

    Professor at Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of California, Irvine

    Dr. Rose’s groundbreaking work on the impact of natural selection on aging has helped to shape the entire field of gerontology and ground it in the context of evolutionary biology. He is perhaps best known for radically extending the lives of fruit flies, challenging conventional notions of the immutability of aging. Rose has further questioned traditional views of aging and its inevitability through his exploration of mortality rate plateaus. Rose is the rare career academic scientist who has had the boldness and fortitude to openly advocate for treating aging as a disease in need o curing. His pioneering laboratory work and data based findings have helped to buttress this position and empowered the entire super longevity community.

2022 Award Ceremony