Still under the weather (literally).
Yesterday I noticed a post on Tim O’Reilly’s multi-author blog regarding a recent synthetic biology article in The Economist. Although The Economist has a formal policy against publishing by-lines, it was written by Nikolaj Nyholm and is fairly interesting as it tries to remain hype-free (set in contrast to futurologists such as the seemingly starry-eyed Kurzweil).
The timing is somewhat serendipitous because today, the SFGate published an overview surrounding scientist Aubrey de Grey and his Methuselah Mouse Prize. Apparently, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and libertarian technologist, donated $3.5 million to the organization which is attempting to reverse the aging process. See also this interesting Wired piece on Thiel and PayPal from 2001.
De Grey’s work has of course been criticized and scrutinized by his peers, including a highly public debate with the editor of MIT’s Technology Review magazine.¬† See also this news release.
Back to Thiel, he eventually sold PayPal to eBay back in 2002 and his cut was $1.5 billion. He then started a VC firm and has been instrumental as a lead or angel investor in web companies such as Facebook.
Last year eBay also purchased Skype. One of the original investors of Skype was Steve Jurvetson, who is also a managing director of a well-known VC firm.  He is also a libertarian technologist of sorts, which may be explained by his Estonian heritage.  Estonia of course, has become the poster child of post-Soviet, free-market success in Europe and is a hot bed for technological-based entrepreneurship.