Personal Science Week - 240516 Longevity Hands-On
A free class on practical longevity research, plus more links
Personal scientists like to get our hands dirty, which means learning how to do the same kinds of hard-core research as the professionals.
This week we’ll describe some takeaways from an excellent webinar on longevity research.
A free deep-dive into longevity research
The bargain of the week in science education was the ISB Systems Biology of Aging Virtual Workshop. The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) is a Seattle-based non-profit research organization whose scientists do interesting research on topics relevant to personal science, including the microbiome, genomics, and longevity.
The best part for personal scientists is that the instructors showed all their code and gave step-by-step instructions so you could follow along in a well-done online Jupyter notebook. The setup and operation was extremely easy. If you're even slightly interested in the nuts-and-bolts of cutting-edge longevity research, this is perfect introduction.
What did I learn? My most inspiring takeaway was how it's possible to uncover the molecules that have the biggest impact on aging entirely from algorithms applied to a pile of lab results. No fancy, expensive laboratory equipment or lengthy clinical trials required. In other words, any personal scientist with access to data can do this too!
The webinar examples revolve around the well-documented Frailty Index, which is a rigorous, numerical way to rate what really matters for aging.1 Using that, applied to a data set of blood test results, here’s a key chart that we learned how to make:
Interleukin-1 happens to be a well-studied protein associated with the immune system, so it’s reassuring that the algorithm happened to zero in on this.
Okay so maybe that doesn’t mean a lot to you right now, but the exciting takeaway is that algorithms, not expensive lab experiments, found a list of molecules that are directly involved in aging. You could have discovered this yourself!
What else might you be able to discover? Check it out: all course materials are available on GitHub.
Speaking of ISB
One reason ISB is able to do this research is thanks to their “Arivale dataset” with research-grade quality test results from more than 1000 people sampled longitudinally for genomics, blood metabolites, microbiome and much more. Exercises from the workshop were based on that data set.
For another example of the potential of rigorous longitudinal sampling, check out this one-hour NIH lecture showing how researchers were able to “rewind the tape”. This proteomics test shows something weird happened more than 1 year before a bladder cancer diagnosis. It won’t be too many years before every personal scientist will be able to to this kind of analysis.
ISB does these open-to-the-public webinars fairly regularly. We discussed their Virtual Microbiome Series back in PS Week 221020
Clinical Study of the Week
Female Asian Never Smokers (FANS ) is recruiting subjects to try to understand why lung cancer rates are outrageously high among Asian women who never smoke. Studies in Asia have blamed this phenomenon on fumes related to cooking, but nobody knows how that might apply to Asian-Americans.
More Personal Science This Week
A May 1 article in Nature describes a well-done experiment where UK doctors deliberately tried to infect volunteers with COVID, but failed. They consider lots of reasons but don't seem to consider the most bizarre possibility: maybe infections don't spread the way we think. We discussed other examples in PS Week 230727, including reports from the sailing ship Echizen Maru, where 57 crew members tested positive for covid-19 after more than a month of isolation on the high seas. Similarly, new cases popped up at the Belgian research station Princesse Elizabeth despite lengthy quarantines, multiple negative covid tests, and vaccination. Long before COVID, there was a documented case of Antarctic scientists catching cold after seventeen weeks of complete isolation. (see this Twitter thread for more).
HIPPA in practice is a really dumb law, “a relic of a time when digital communications did not exist. The benefits of being able to email and text doctors vastly exceed the costs, and obviously so. Other places like the UK don’t have it and it’s much better.”
The Peterson Health Technology Institute released a report studying digital diabetes management solutions (DarioHealth, Glooko, Omada, Perry Health, Teladoc, Verily, Vida, and Virta Health). Conclusion: they don't work. Nutritional ketosis is the one technique that seems to work, but as always "more studies are needed". But note that Fierce Biotech thinks the report relies on small sample sizes and didn't ask endocrinologists for feedback.
About Personal Science
The professionals tell us we’re supposed to trust them, but personal scientists are skeptical of everyone. We’re also open-minded, so we like to hear from experts too. But ultimately we like to understand for ourselves.
We publish this general newsletter for free each Thursday, but if you are able to handle more delicate and controversial topics, paid subscribers can access our “unpopular science” series, including this week’s one on skin cancer and unscientific journals.
We also love to be proven wrong, so if you have other thoughts or comments, please let us know.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a good online calculator for the frailty test used by ISB. I suspect this is because the medical-grade tests are complicated and time-consuming, so they require special training. (If you know of a reasonable online version, please let us know ). ↩︎