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Thiel Foundation
The Thiel Foundation is a private foundation created and funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. Theory of philanthropy Thiel concentrates the bulk of his philanthropic efforts on what he sees as potential breakthrough technologies. In November 2010, Thiel organized a Breakthrough Philanthropy conference that showcased eight nonprofits that he believed were working on radical new ideas in technology, government, and human affairs. A similar conference was organized in December 2011 with the name "Fast Forward". Internal projects The Thiel Foundation has three main internal projects: the Thiel Fellowship, Imitatio, and Breakout Labs. Thiel Fellowship The Thiel Fellowship (originally named 20 under 20) is intended for young visionaries under the age of 20 and offers them a total of $100,000 over two years as well as guidance and other resources to drop out of school and pursue other work, which could involve scientific r ...
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Peter Thiel
Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. , Thiel had an estimated net worth of $7.19 billion and was ranked 297th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He worked as a securities lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, as a speechwriter for former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett and as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. He founded Thiel Capital Management in 1996. He co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek in 1998, serving as chief executive officer until its sale to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. After PayPal, he founded Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund based in San Francisco. In 2003, he launched Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company, serving as its chairman since its inception. In 2005, he launched Founders Fund with PayPal partn ...
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Machine Intelligence Research Institute
The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), is a non-profit research institute focused since 2005 on identifying and managing potential existential risks from artificial general intelligence. MIRI's work has focused on a friendly AI approach to system design and on predicting the rate of technology development. History In 2000, Eliezer Yudkowsky founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence with funding from Brian and Sabine Atkins, with the purpose of accelerating the development of artificial intelligence (AI). However, Yudkowsky began to be concerned that AI systems developed in the future could become superintelligent and pose risks to humanity, and in 2005 the institute moved to Silicon Valley and began to focus on ways to identify and manage those risks, which were at the time largely ignored by scientists in the field. Starting in 2006, the Institute organized the Singularity ...
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Methuselah Foundation
The Methuselah Foundation is an American-based global non-profit organization, based in Springfield, Virginia, with a declared mission to "make 90 the new 50 by 2030" by supporting tissue engineering and regenerative medicine therapies. The organization was originally incorporated by David Gobel in 2001 as the Performance Prize Society, a name inspired by the British governments Longitude Act, which offered monetary rewards for anyone who could devise a portable, practical solution for determining a ship's longitude. Founding In 2003, David Gobel, Aubrey de Grey, and Dane Gobel rebranded the organization Methuselah Foundation, named after Methuselah, the grandfather of Noah in the Hebrew Bible, whose lifespan was recorded as 969 years. The new name was introduced at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the American Aging Association, where they awarded the first Methuselah Mouse Prize to Andrej Bartke for his work on mice that lived the equivalent of 180 human years. The Foundation's wor ...
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Life Extension
Life extension is the concept of extending the human life expectancy, lifespan, either modestly through improvements in medicine or dramatically by increasing the maximum lifespan beyond its generally-settled oldest people, limit of 125 years. Several researchers in the area, along with "life extensionists", "immortalists" or "longevists" (those who wish to achieve longer lives themselves), postulate that future breakthroughs in tissue rejuvenation (aging), rejuvenation, stem cells, regenerative medicine, molecular repair, gene therapy, pharmaceuticals and organ (anatomy), organ replacement (such as with artificial organs or xenotransplantations) will eventually enable humans to have indefinite lifespans (agerasia) through complete rejuvenation to a healthy youthful condition. The ethical ramifications, if life extension becomes a possibility, are debated by bioethicists. The sale of purported anti-aging products such as supplements and hormone replacement is a lucrative global i ...
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Oslo Freedom Forum
Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF) is a series of global conferences run by the New York-based non-profit Human Rights Foundation under the slogan "Challenging Power". OFF was founded in 2009 as a one-time event and has taken place annually ever since. One of the key objectives of the conferences is to bring together notable people, including former heads of state, winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, prisoners of conscience, as well as of other public figures in order to network and exchange ideas about human rights and exposing dictatorships. The main OFF conference is held annually in central Oslo, Norway, while satellite events have been held in San Francisco and New York, and on college campuses in the United States. OFF talks are live-streamed and consist of lectures and panel discussions taking place in front of a live audience. OFF was founded by human rights activist Thor Halvorssen. Events ;2009 The inaugural Oslo Freedom Forum, titled "The Nobility of the Human Spirit and the P ...
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Human Rights Foundation
The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is a non-profit organization that focuses on promoting and protecting human rights globally, with an emphasis on closed societies. HRF organizes the Oslo Freedom Forum. The Human Rights Foundation was founded in 2005 by Thor Halvorssen Mendoza, a Venezuelan film producer and human rights advocate. The current chairman is Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, and Javier El-Hage is the current chief legal officer. The foundation's head office is in the Empire State Building in New York City. Organization HRF's website states that it adheres to the definition of human rights as put forth in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976), believing that all individuals are entitled to the right to speak freely, the right to worship in the manner of their choice, the right to freely associate with those of like mind, the right to acquire and dispose of property, the right to leave and enter their country, the right to equal trea ...
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Committee To Protect Journalists
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is an American independent non-profit, non-governmental organization, based in New York City, New York, with correspondents around the world. CPJ promotes press freedom and defends the rights of journalists. The ''American Journalism Review'' has called the organization, "Journalism's Red Cross." Since late 1980s, the organization has been publishing an annual census of journalists killed or imprisoned in relation to their work. History and programs The Committee to Protect Journalists was founded in 1981 in response to the harassment of Paraguayan journalist Alcibiades González Delvalle. Its founding honorary chairman was Walter Cronkite. Since 1991, it has held the annual CPJ International Press Freedom Awards Dinner, during which awards are given to journalists and press freedom advocates who have endured beatings, threats, intimidation, and prison for reporting the news. Between 2002 and 2008, it published a biannual magazine, ''D ...
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Patri Friedman
Patri Friedman (born July 29, 1976) is an American libertarian, neoreactionary, anarcho-capitalist, and theorist of political economy. He founded The Seasteading Institute, a non-profit that explores the creation of sovereign ocean colonies. Early life Named after family friend Patri Pugliese, Friedman grew up in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and is a graduate of Upper Merion Area High School, class of 1994, where he went by the name Patri Forwalter-Friedman. He graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 1998, and went on to Stanford University to obtain his master's degree in computer science. He also holds an MBA from New York Institute of Technology – Ellis College. He worked as a software engineer at Google. As a poker player, he cashed in the World Series of Poker four times. The Seasteading Institute Friedman was executive director of The Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008, with a half-million-dollar donation from venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The Institute's ...
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Seasteading
Seasteading is the concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads, in international waters outside the territory claimed by any government. No one has yet created a structure on the high seas that has been recognized as a sovereign state. Proposed structures have included modified cruise ships, refitted oil platforms, and custom-built floating islands. Proponents say seasteads can "provide the means for rapid innovation in voluntary governance and reverse environmental damage to our oceans ... and foster entrepreneurship." Some critics fear seasteads may function more as a refuge for the wealthy to Tax evasion, avoid taxes or other obligations. While seasteading gives an impression of freedom from unwanted rules and regulations, the high seas are "some of the most tightly regulated places on Earth" despite appearing borderless and free; in particular the cruise ship industry is highly regulated. The term ''seasteading'' is a blend word, blend of ''sea'' and ...
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Cynthia Kenyon
Cynthia Jane Kenyon (born February 21, 1954) is an American molecular biologist and biogerontologist known for her genetic dissection of aging in a widely used model organism, the roundworm ''Caenorhabditis elegans''. She is the vice president of aging research at Calico Research Labs, and emeritus professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Career Cynthia Kenyon graduated valedictorian in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Georgia in 1976. She received her Ph.D. in 1981 from MIT where, in Graham Walker's laboratory, she looked for genes on the basis of their activity profiles, discovering that DNA-damaging agents activate a battery of DNA repair genes in E. coli. She then did postdoctoral studies with Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, studying the development of ''C. elegans.'' Since 1986 she has been at the UCSF, where she was the Herbert Boyer Dis ...
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Senescence
Senescence () or biological aging is the gradual deterioration of functional characteristics in living organisms. The word ''senescence'' can refer to either cellular senescence or to senescence of the whole organism. Organismal senescence involves an increase in death rates and/or a decrease in fecundity with increasing age, at least in the latter part of an organism's life cycle. Senescence is the inevitable fate of almost all multicellular organisms with germ-soma separation, but it can be delayed. The discovery, in 1934, that calorie restriction can extend lifespan by 50% in rats, and the existence of species having negligible senescence and potentially immortal organisms such as '' Hydra'', have motivated research into delaying senescence and thus age-related diseases. Rare human mutations can cause accelerated aging diseases. Environmental factors may affect aging – for example, overexposure to ultraviolet radiation accelerates skin aging. Different parts of the body ...
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SENS Foundation
The SENS Research Foundation is a non-profit organization that does research programs and public relations work for the application of regenerative medicine to aging. It was founded in 2009, located in Mountain View, California, USA. The organization publishes its reports annually. History Before the foundation was founded in March 2009, the SENS research program was mainly pursued by the Methuselah Foundation, co-founded by Aubrey de Grey and David Gobel. When the SENS rejuvenation approach was announced in the 2000s, while some biogerontologists supported the SENS program, many contended that the ultimate goals of de Grey's programme were too speculative given the state of technology and referred to it as "fantasy rather than science". By mid-2010s, the rejuvenation approach gained traction with multiple startup companies created from SENS research findings. In 2021 Michael Greve pledged another €300 million for rejuvenation biotechnology startup companies. In 2021, Underd ...
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