2) Retrospective Grants

Retrospective Grants are a novel funding mechanism that rewards the largest contributions to longevity after the fact. For example, the Nobel Prizes can be seen as a version of this for science in general.

Every year, LongevityDAO will examine the largest breakthroughs in longevity, and then provide grants for the organizations that most enabled that breakthrough, from the application level to the basic science level.

The efficiency and economic leverage of retrospective grants are well-articulated by Vitalik Buterin here. Like X-Prizes, they incentivize results instead of effort, and additionally allow us to determine ex-post what the biggest contributions are. This is especially useful for basic science research, for which X-Prizes are difficult to establish because it is uncertain which basic research will be useful later on.

For example, one leading candidate for retrospective grants would be cellular reprogramming, This would involve grants to Yamanaka as well the largest impact articles cited by his seminal paper, and articles cited by those papers, and so forth down the chain, with an emphasis on researchers who have high impact and haven’t been rewarded yet.