I’m a Millennial. And an INTJ. I was an engineer long before I was a physician. Given all these, efficiency is in my blood. I detest waste of all kinds. Waste of time, waste of money, waste of neurons. If you notice the mouse image below, that is exactly how I think when faced with a mental maze 🙂 And although I stopped practicing engineering (for the moment at least), one thing I learned was to piggyback on the invented wheel instead of re-inventing it all over again. It’s cheaper, easier and faster for everyone involved to reuse the same wheel pattern. It’s the same thing with aging. When I started the medical residency in geriatrics, I wondered whether aging is the fate of all species. And it’s not. As long as there are negligibly senescent and long-lived species out there, why reinvent the wheel? Aging has already been solved, just not in humans.

Senescence follows three basic phenotypes in different species – you can have:
– fast senescence
– gradual senescence
– negligible senescence
I specifically mention senescence instead of aging because the former is the final decrepit state of the latter, but in common language the two terms are used interchangeably. Apart from the rate at which aging takes place, species may be short-lived and long-lived, at least by comparison to the average human lifespan.

Short-lived and fast aging species are great choices to screen anti-aging interventions: chemical substances, physical factors, biological additions. Once an effect is noticed on short-lived species, gradual-aging ones can be used to test what you screened. And where do you start when you want to screen interventions? You start from those species that ‘know’ what they’re doing: negligibly senescent and long-lived ones.

Bionics is the application of biological data to engineering systems. What I proposed above is a circular type of bionics where you learn some biotechnology from one species and then you apply it in another one which didn’t use it naturally. Sort of like penicillin which was first manufactured by fungi and later on used by countless of human patients.

The secret sauce here is big data.

There are mountains of data floating around the Internet. Lots of it is open access. Lots of interesting papers waiting to be read, analyzed and applied. Data mining software is getting better. Many open source varieties exist.
But things could look a lot better if the indie movement would infiltrate science just like it infiltrated art. Because there are lots of people with 1-2 free hours per day, with no experience in academia, with interesting skills of all sorts and with a desire to extend human lifespan, but they are shunned by the formal academic world. It all looks so complicated from the outside, when it’s not.
There is nothing fancy about the scientific method. You basically maintain two datasets in the same environment and you vary one thing ONLY at a time. You compare stuff. Ideally by randomizing the dataset which is modified and taking care to avoid bias by double-blinding.
That’s the scientific method in a nutshell.

A second benefit of democratizing who gets to do science is that it would (partially) get the politics out of it. Not so much the financial concerns, on the contrary. But since indies would fund their own experiments, bureaucracy would be reduced.
Ever since the indie publishing movement has begun, many quality books entered the market without the inefficiency of selling your book proposal to lots of agents and editors and the inefficiency of delivering print books which may or may not sell. Instead, readers are the ones who judge books now. And I’m fine with that. If publishing a book wouldn’t have been so efficient in terms of time, I doubt ‘The aging gap between species’ would have seen the day of light last year. The Internet made it all happen. Otherwise, it would have taken me close to a lifetime to go through hundreds of papers in search of patterns of aging – what is common and what is different between species.

I had a nagging question. I had to answer it and organize my thoughts around this. I wrote the book and I published it. The final judge are the readers. And since it is available as print-on-demand, unnecessary copies are not printed and then 3 months later pulped because readers just weren’t there at the right time. You can now write what you want, put it out there for free if you want to and have a worldwide audience with a minimum of costs. And since I experienced life as an indie author, I’d like to see the same efficiency and openness in science.

Unlike other fields of research, biology entails specific ethical concerns, risks and often expensive tools. But with the dematerialization and the demonetization that comes up with the 21st century, I sense that bio programming will become just as important as computer programming has become today. The bio stuff will similarly become more and more user-friendly to use and hack.
A Silicon Valley of aging research is possible and desirable.
And since leanness and openness are important in the original Silicon Valley, let me start with lean examples from the medical world. Lately I read ‘The frugal innovator’ book and the healthcare examples I read about got my brain gears spinning. High-tech has its place, but the challenge of developing drugs for the poor makes the whole process leaner for everyone involved. Sometimes, available and cheap drugs are not enough if the health-favoring behavior is not there. And when experts are scarce, it is time to allow patients to mentor each other like it happened in South Africa where mothers helped other mothers deal with an HIV-positive diagnosis so that antiretrovirals are taken despite the social stigma and mother-newborn transmission gets diminished.

Another example is oxytocin being delivered to women in labor suffering from deadly hemorrhages. The regular injectable method needs: 1 nurse + refrigeration which is powered by electricity + sterile conditions for the injection itself. The alternative method mentioned in ‘The frugal innovator’ is oxytocin delivered as a heat-stable spray by the woman herself. Different environments demand different designs.
Medical technologies for the poor should be:
–stable under intense heat
–portable – by bikes or by mobile phone Internet connection
–simple to use
–cheap to manufacture and deliver
And so could the future anti-aging therapies because the poor get old too. And they do that much faster. With much less available capital to manage aging.

Solving aging is not something for the rich only. The poor would actually benefit a lot more from anti-aging therapies: they often sell their time to make a living and their bodies get worn faster.

And since I opened this blog post with my hope for the indie scientist movement, data mining techniques and open databases are key in translating the aging solution to a species like us that ages. What we are witnessing in science today is similar to the state of the Internet in the ‘90s. Few people saw its potential then. Few people see the potential of indie science today. But little strides are made. And here are the tools I am aware of that are open to you if you are able to read this blog post on some Internet-connected device, followed by the things that could make life easier for the indie scientist but they are not here yet.
Tools for indie science available today
Datasets:
-gene expression datasets on Pubmed
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gds
-open databases with clinical trials to see what is already out there both completed and in work
Clinicaltrials.gov

(As a tip in case what you’re looking for is not among the examples above, use ‘dataset’ and ‘open database’ in your search query after your keywords of interest. There are many datasets and open databases of genetics, proteomics, metabolomics, medical imaging on many species, including humans.)

Open source software for:
-data mining
-chemical drug design
-DNA editing

Kits, equipment and consumables:
-many can be bought from Amazon, eBay, dedicated online shops, niche forums, Facebook sale groups and many more. Unfortunately, many expensive tools can’t be shared when not in use and I’ll discuss this below in the tools that don’t exist yet section.
-if you need something very specific, check out Thingiverse for open 3D print models, customize what you need on your PC and print at your nearest 3D printer by entering your zip code at 3D Hubs. It’s cheap, fast and efficient. I often customize designs in Blender which takes a while to learn. I’m not a guru at that, but I know enough to customize what I need.

Biological models:
-plants of all sorts
-yeast is an eukaryotic organism with a lifespan of a few days. Baking yeast can be very cheaply bought from any supermarket. There you have a fast-aging microorganism whose age you can count at a regular optical microscope by counting its bud scars. One bud scar is one cell division. I previously wrote a blog post on cell polarity and aging if you’re interested.
-hydras can be obtained from most any pond or freshwater lake. Besides, they are freshwater aquarium pests thanks to their regenerative abilities. Some species age, others don’t – check out this blog post on that.
-a bee colony contains 3 castes with 3 different types of aging: drones die immediately after mating, worker bees live a couple of months (more if overwintering) and the queen lives 2-3 years (although most beekeepers replace her every new year to increase honey yield)

 

Tools for indie science NOT available today

If I am wrong and these things already exist, please say so in the comments! As I am typing this blog post, I am not aware of any such tools yet. Here are the things which might speed up the translation of aging solutions from non-aging species to aging ones:
–an Uber for scientists or something like the sharing economy for science tools

Currently, if you want to put a drug or a medical device on the market you need to invest in expensive tools that you may not use most of the time. What if instead of an expensive microscope that is used only 1% of its time by a couple of researchers, several others could have access for a fee? The closest thing I found is this wetware lab from New York. Such tools can be informally accessed in academia, but it is based on networking and it is usually open to formal researchers only. I want something simpler where anyone (under proper supervision or with minimal training) could use a certain tool in exchange of a fee. Many labs are underfunded, so why not rent the equipment to researchers all over the world?

–peer-reviewed journals that wouldn’t charge an arm and a leg for publishing results. While in formal situations the lab or the library would pay the cost, this ain’t possible for indie scientists. Online archives do exist mostly in the IT field. If you know of any such solution in the biology field, please drop a line below in the comments section. Open source journals are open to readers, but they cost quite a lot for authors. The latter and peer reviewers are not paid for the services. Journals do a great service of maintaining those papers available and connecting authors with editors, but is that enough to justify $30-40 per paper?

–open biotech labs – where you could rent access, do your experiments, publish openly so that anyone can peer review you – preferably in places with big traffic so that your results are rapidly known by the interested, be able to crowdfund or accept donations/investments for your science projects and keep the intellectual property of everything you bring to the table in order to take the project further if you wish so without any encumbering paperwork

–pet communities where researchers could contact willing pet owners to try new technologies and geroprotectors that might expand the lifespan of their pets
–dedicated biotech and medical business incubators – while useful, most current business incubators are focused on the IT area (at least that’s the situation where I live). Entrepreneurship is just as necessary as the open source culture to make things happen and bring anti-aging solutions to the market. And these solutions should be based on sound science and not science tabloids. Anyone interested should be able to check the experiments on which they rely on.

 

Before doing science on your own, it is important to learn two things first:
–how to read a scientific paper and make sure there are no blatant errors – one book I recommend is ‘Bad science’ by UK physician Ben Goldacre.  Always compare the results with the conclusions. Check whether there is any control in the experiment. And learn that great results in vitro are often non-existing in complex humans. More importantly, learn to differentiate between a science paper and a science tabloid!
–how to find scientific papers
I mainly use Google Scholar and Pubmed where I search for systematic reviews first. For those journals where you can’t access the paper for free, get a library card to your local medical or university library. Sometimes you could access those papers from your computer at home with the username and password available on your library card. It depends on what contracts the library has signed for. Even if the library has a certain target audience like medical professionals, if you ask you’ll notice that they don’t specifically forbid outsiders. I am a library junkie and I tested this again and again.

 

On ethics and regulations

The medical and biological field is fraught with regulation and ethical concerns. And most of these regulations are well-minded. I think we are living in a better world because of them – as a patient I’m grateful for that. While creation does entail risks, many of them can be mitigated by an army of indie scientists helping in every way possible.
In most countries, animal research laws are there for those animals where we know or suppose they could feel pain: all vertebrates and cephalopod invertebrates. Certainly, suffering is something to be avoided. And unnecessary suffering is to be eliminated. Fortunately, a lot of hypotheses can be tested on computer models, cell cultures, plants etc. Do your research beforehand – you’d be surprised what was already tested.
When it comes to humans, consent is necessary whenever you get biological data directly from the subject (for example the serum homocysteine) and when you use confidential data. If data is in public databases already, then you don’t need additional consent. If in doubt, check with a lawyer and/or with a local ethics committee. If you wanna go further and bring a new technology on the market, you will need to partner with formal institutions and outsourcing research companies.

To sum it all up
Indies are important in science – just like they are in art – in order to solve medical and biological problems while maintaining a stake in their work and being allowed to be led by their curiosity and common sense instead of office politics. And since it is much more difficult to make money as an independent researcher, this will only force you to find cheaper, better, faster solutions that will scale further. There is no reward for being efficient and no punishment for being inefficient as a researcher that gets a salary and one who researches whatever the company/institute wants to whether it makes sense or not.

Aging has already been solved in the few negligibly senescent species out there.

But it takes work to translate that in humans.

Hard work and smart work.

What can you do today in 1 hour only? But tomorrow?

 

Anca Ioviţă is the author of Eat Less Live Longer: Your Practical Guide to Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition ,The Aging Gap Between Species and What Is Your Legacy? 101Ways on Getting Started to Create and Build One available on Amazon and several other places. If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to sign up to receive updates on longevity news and novel book projects!

Don’t miss out on the Pinterest board on calorie restriction with optimal nutrition where she pins new recipes every day.
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