In the first Director's report that I wrote more than a decade ago, I pointed to the slow, incremental development of science, the need for support for innovation and creativity in research, and the difficulty of finding the funding to support such science. The goal of The Ellison Medical Foundation (EMF) was, and is, “to respond to that need, providing scientists with the resources, freedom, and flexibility to pursue high-risk research that could have a scientific impact world-wide.” It was our hope then that our programs would stimulate creative research and have significant impact on the course of basic biological and biomedical research on aging. We worried a bit that within a few years the number and creativity of proposals we receive might decline. We needn’t have worried. As progress in basic aging research has grown more and more successful, Federal funding for the research, along with most other health related science, has stagnated. The result has been a dramatic increase in applications to EMF. In response, with Larry Ellison’s generosity, we have more than doubled the number of New and Senior Scholar awards we make (25 four year awards in each program each year). We are proud that we have become a major force in the success of basic aging research. We are committed to continuing that role and looking to expand EMF’s influence to other important, significantly underfunded areas of basic biological science.