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

2024 Recipient - Dr. Greg Fahy

Intervene Immune, CSO
Designed and led the TRIIM trial; Published the first report of thymus regeneration in a normal human; Granted patents on methods for and applications of human thymus regeneration
Fellow of the American Aging Association (since 2005), Former Director of the American Aging Association (16 years)
Editor-in-Chief, The Future of Aging: Pathways to Human Life Extension
Awarded the Society for Cryobiology’s Luyet Medal in 2016
In 2009, showed indefinite survival of rabbit kidney transplanted after cooling to -130° Celsius; Led 21CM team as co-winner of Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize, 2018 winner of Large Mammal Brain Preservation Prize.
2023 Recipient - Liz Parrish

BioViva Sciences, CEO
Elizabeth Parrish is a humanitarian, entrepreneur, innovator, author, and advocate for genetic cures. As a proponent of progress and education for the advancement of regenerative medicine, she serves as a motivational speaker to the public at large for the life sciences. She is actively involved in international educational media outreach and is a founding member of the International Longevity Alliance (ILA). She is a member of the Life Science Institute of New Jersey, whose mission is to further scientific understanding of the nature and origins of human disease. She was the founder of BioTrove Investments LLC and the BioTrove Podcasts, offering a meaningful way for people to learn about and fund research in regenerative medicine.
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.