Biohackers,
Early adopters,
Enthusiasts,
who are doing things to extend their life expectancy
This 3 minute video is for prospective participants and those who are interested in learning more about the DataBETA project.
We are recruiting 5,000 participants—people who are doing things to extend life expectancy that most people don’t know about or would not consider. We offer them an extensive questionnaire about everything from social conditions to p
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gs, and follow up to see which answers change over time. Each person receives a methylation test at the beginning and end of a two-year period.
At the end of the two years, we will make a plot of how much people aged over that time. We expect to see a bell-shaped curve, with most people aging two years, or perhaps a little less if the things we are doing are generally effective.
It
is the tail ends of that bell curve that haves the most information. We will look for a “fat tail” in the bell curve, consisting of an excess of people at the end that suggests very slow aging. We will use data mining and multivariate analysis to find combinations of factors that may account for the especially slow aging achieved by people in this group. If we find factors that are common to this group, then we will have a good candidate for a combination of treatments that is very effective at slowing the aging process. These combinations—if found—will be good candidates for a placebo-controlled trial in the future.
The first credible and accurate test for biological age is the methylation clock, and it is changing the landscape of longevity research.
Methylation clocks were developed by a UCLA professor named Dr. Steve Horvath. Dr. Horvath’s research examined chemical changes to genetic material and found that patterns of DNA methylation can accurately estimate biological age.
DataBETA will use methylation clocks to evaluate the rate of aging in a brief two-year window. Participants will receive an at home-blood sample kit from TruDiagnostic that will calculate their methylation patterns and age.
Da ta-BETA is entirely open-source. All information will be shared with the public. Raw data will be available for any researcher to analyze. This is very important because buried in the vast mine of data gathered for thousands of participants are not only lifestyle factors, but also genomic, epigenomic, and circumstantial factors that, at minimum, will offer suggestions for deeper investigation and personal interventions. Besides the primary search for high-confidence, favorable intervention synergy, advantageous as well as neutral and adverse factors, low-confidence lesser effects and powerful effects will be wrenched from the database, pointing to areas where further research - and possibly warnings - are appropriate.
We’ve
been part of the life extension community for 25 years, keeping up with the latest science, experimenting on ourselves as early adopters. For the most part, we’re flying blind. We try a new strategy or a new supplement based on a few studies of rodents, or based on metabolic correlates that we think are related to the aging metabolism. To study longevity in humans requires tens of millions of dollars per supplement and takes at least a decade of observation.
The Chief Scientist and study author is Joshua Mitteldorf, a polymath who stands out as a leader in the understanding and application of ‘programmed aging’. Project director is Dr. Ashish Rajput, PhD. Other staff members include Walter Crompton, Bill Hees, and Tamar Valdman.
There are three distinct ways you can support the DataBETA project:
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