LongeviQuest has announced a Mutual Recognition and Partnership Agreement with the European Supercentenarian Organisation (ESO).

LongeviQuest CEO Ben Meyers announced the agreement with the following statement:

“I am happy to share with you that the European Supercentenarian Organisation (ESO) and LongeviQuest (LQ) have reached a formal agreement on mutual recognition and partnership.  Moving forward, we each recognize the legitimacy of each other’s research and consider each other Accredited Partner Organisations.

This agreement follows months of dialogue between me and the co-founders of ESO – Dr. Andrew Holmes, Chris Law, and Marco Wikkerink – as well as discussions between the three of them and ESO’s family of correspondents.  The result is an agreement which grants ESO equal stature to LQ Subsidiaries for research and validation purposes.  That means a few things, including:
·       Immediately, LQ recognizes 885 cases validated by ESO.  These cases were compiled by ESO leadership and reviewed by the LQ Research Leadership Team.  Because it will take some time to input all of these into the LQ Directory, we will soon share the list separately to confirm our recognition of these cases.  Additionally, ESO recognizes all LQ validations.
·       ESO will now be represented on the Global Validation Commission.  The ESO Commissioner will have equal voting power to the Commissioners representing LQ Subsidiaries.  They will vote on validations, including those sourced from LQ, and will also be empowered to enforce (and refine) validation standards and procedures.
·       Validations sourced from ESO will have Accredited Status, giving them the “benefit of the doubt” and requiring a higher threshold for rejection by the Global Validation Commission.  For validation approval purposes, ESO cases and LQ cases will be treated the same.

It is important to note that this is a partnership, not a merger.  The mutual recognition agreement only covers future cases which are submitted to the Global Validation Commission, but no ESO researcher will ever be compelled to submit cases to LQ.  This agreement represents collaboration in the purest sense, enabling us to achieve together even more than we have already achieved apart.

You will hear more from the leadership of both ESO and LQ in the coming days.  This is an exciting time for our field!”