[fuelfive]

I like your thinking, but I believe this would be more effectively approached from a position of greater leverage. One person's $10M helps LE research, but we could do a hundred times more if we instead collected $10 from 100M people. Why do most people not care about this and other important issues?

If we are to invest in basic science, it seems like more could be accomplished by understanding how beliefs are formed, and how beliefs map to behavior. With this understanding, we could shape society so that people grow up to be more rational and altruistic, and thus far more interested in spending $10 on life extension than on lottery tickets.

From another angle, most premature death in the US occurs from diseases of behavior. We could extend a lot of lives if we understood why most people pick short term payoffs (McDonalds, TV) instead of long term payoffs (vegetables, exercise).