Templeton: $60M+ for Intelligence Venture, Life Sciences deadline July 15
John Templeton Foundation is accepting Life Sciences applications through July 15, 2026; the cycle is tied to Intelligence Venture ($60M+ over three years across six funding areas), with measurability required, clinical research excluded, and Levin/Pio-Lopez's aging-as-loss-of-shared-purpose framework among the relevant threads.
Applications close July 15, 2026. John Templeton Foundation has opened its Life Sciences cycle and tied it to Intelligence Venture, a program deploying more than $60 million in grants over three years across six Templeton funding areas. The unifying question: how intelligence works in living, synthetic, and artificial systems. The foundation does not say how much of that $60M+ goes to Life Sciences.
Among the listed topics: agency (a system's capacity to act toward a goal, whether a cell closing a wound, a plant rerouting growth under stress, or a colony of cells reaching a collective decision), consciousness, intelligence without a nervous system, plants, fungi, cellular networks, biohybrid systems, decentralized AI, and models with self-improvement loops.
Two biology subtracks. Emergent properties: qualities that arise from the collective interaction of a system's components. Genetics and genomics: how genome and RNA regulation alters protein activity, and through it health, disease resilience, and organism traits.
The filter is real. Theory and simulation are accepted, but priority goes to projects grounded in experimental biological data that produce testable predictions. Elegant metaphors about an organism's goals have to become metrics, experiments, and detectable failures of prediction.
Aging here is a question of control. Researchers Michael Levin and Leo Pio-Lopez described aging as the loss of shared purpose in a cellular collective: cells maintain body form as long as their local decisions align with the organism's overall goal. Templeton now accepts proposals along these lines, though the program is broader and covers cells, fungi, synthetic biology, and AI alike. Clinical research, clinical tools, and standard translational medicine are excluded from this cycle. Agricultural crop resilience is the only applied exception.
If projects like these learn to measure the goals and decisions of living systems, biology gains a new descriptive level above "gene on, protein off." Regeneration, morphogenesis, and aging could then be described as loss of control: which signal broke, which shared goal disappeared, why the tissue chose that particular state.
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Selected because Intelligence Venture directly funds cellular-agency and biological-goal research with clear longevity adjacency through the Levin/Pio-Lopez aging framework, and the July 15 deadline makes this immediately actionable for researchers in the Eternal Search audience. The linked John Templeton Foundation organization page gives readers a direct entry point to this funder's profile and grant history.