Find research you like, find a syndicate of investors, and do the legwork to bring those two things together. This is going on today in the matter of rejuvenation research - people talking about and funding the early stage startups they like that happen to be following the SENS model for cell and tissue damage repair. You don't even have to be wealthy to do this, just someone who can talk to be people and knows something about the science. Scores of people in the network built around the SENS Research Foundation are doing their part to make relationships and get the right people talking to one another in order to launch startups working on the desired types of therapy.

That is how it is done.

From the point of view of people with funds to spend, there is more that can be done to influence research than just sitting around waiting for startups to present themselves.

Investing is something that investors do moderately well - there is a method and a discipline and a body of tradition and knowledge. But it isn't the only thing that investors can do to speed the development of longevity science. What the investment community should do, attempts to some degree, but remains very poor at accomplishing, is the process of nudging along pre-commercial scientific efforts, of strategically funding specific research projects in order to produce a new crop of longevity science companies. This seeding of the field can be highly effective, as the SENS Research Foundation has demonstrated over the past decade or so, yet for the most part even personally interested investors leave philanthropy in their field to other people. Thus funding for truly radical, high-risk, high-reward new research is next to non-existent. The other side of the coin, targeted funding for medical research projects with excellent prospects, or that are only a few years and a million dollars away from the leap to a candidate therapy and a startup, nudging them into the target zone, is also very thin on the ground.

This is a point that Peter Thiel has been making for a few years under the heading of "radical philanthropy." The investor community does conduct philanthropy, but in an ad-hoc fashion, without much organization, rigor, or discipline. There is no body of tradition and knowledge in the same way as exists in the business of for-profit investment. Thus great many philathropic ventures conducted by investors are ultimately largely a waste, failing to achieve the practical ends that are possible in principle because they fail to meaningfully advance research towards the clinic. Money is poorly used, and there is little in the way of deliberate, carefully efforts to nudge promising research across the line. This is strange given that it is a very good way to be positioned as the primary investor in ventures in a field that an individual might want to see move faster.

All of this is to note that the launch of a company happens a long way after the start of the development process, and investors should become involved well before that point if they want to better achieve their goals. Many of the donors to SENS rejuvenation research projects initiatives are investors themselves, and some are presently coming together as a loose community of peers to invest in the startups that are now beginning to emerge from research efforts. Yet this is still at the present time, even hard-won as it is, only one increment better than a collection of happenstance events and connections, tumbling in more or less the right direction and working out because everyone involved has much the same goal in mind - which is to say therapies to treat aging, and sooner rather than later. Building on what has been learned so far, better and more organized ways to meld philanthropy and investment might be assembled. A community with deep pockets that can build the intricate networking tools and the energetic, highly networked approach to for-profit investment that presently exists should be able to make the leap over the barrier to organize and assist the non-profit research pipeline as well.