Preston Estep | |
---|---|
Born | 1960 |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Cornell University (B.S.) Harvard University (Ph.D.) |
Known for | Genomics, genetics, DNA sequencing |
Spouse | Martha Bulyk |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Biochemistry, genomics |
Institutions | Harvard Medical School |
Thesis | Genomic approaches to connecting the transcriptional regulatory network of Saccharomyces cerevisiae stress responses (2001) |
Doctoral advisor | George M. Church |
Preston "Pete" Wayne Estep III is an American biologist and science and technology advocate. He is a graduate of Cornell University, where he did neuroscience research, and he earned a Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard University. He did his doctoral research in the laboratory of genomics pioneer Professor George M. Church at Harvard Medical School. [1]
Estep is an inventor of several technologies including DNA chip-based readout of transposon-based selections [2] and universal DNA protein-binding microarrays (PBMs). [3] He is Director of Gerontology and an adviser to the Personal Genome Project, the first "open-source" genome project founded by George Church and based at Harvard Medical School. He is one of the main subjects of the documentary film Reconvergence.
Estep was the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Veritas Genetics. He is one of the scientific experts featured throughout the first season of the Netflix series Unnatural Selection . In the show, Estep says it is important to obtain genomic information from extraordinary people. Subsequently, he tests the recall abilities of memory champion Nelson Dellis, and then the two tour a genetics lab and observe large DNA sequencing machines as they discuss sequencing Dellis's genome.
Early in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic Estep founded the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC), an open source vaccine project that controversially featured vaccine self administration. [4] [5] [6] [7]
Estep is the author of the 2016 book The Mindspan Diet, which proposes a concept called "mindspan" (a measure of overall health and mental longevity). Estep suggests that mindspan is superior to lifespan and other measures of health and longevity because a key parameter of mindspan is good mental function throughout life. [1] The Mindspan Diet presents a contrast between the longest lived people with high mental function ("the Mindspan Elite") and a second group of people from throughout the world who have good healthcare but shorter lives and the highest levels of cognitive decline ("the Mindspan Risk").
The book suggests that diet is a crucial differentiator, contrasting key dietary components and "biomarkers" (such as body weight, temperature, blood insulin and glucose, cholesterol, etc.) between Mindspan Elite and Mindspan Risk groups. It concludes that dietary iron is a significant difference, with Mindspan Elite having low iron levels in their bodies and brains, while Mindspan Risk has high iron levels. A key finding of the book, which contradicts current dietary recommendations, concerns certain refined carbohydrate foods. The book presents evidence that the base of the dietary pyramids for the Mindspan Elite consists of refined carbs like white rice (for mindspan leader Japan) and refined wheat pasta and bread (for the Mediterranean). Estep notes that these foods in Mindspan Elite countries and regions are not enriched with iron, whereas equivalent foods in Mindspan Risk countries and regions are enriched with iron.
Estep is active in longevity and aging research and in criticizing anti-aging claims he suggests are unrealistic or poorly supported. He was the founding CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of TeloMe, Inc, a telomere analysis company and he is the former CEO of the human longevity research biotech company Longenity, Inc., which he founded with Matt Kaeberlein. Longenity folded but the company published research showing that a calorie restricted diet feminizes gene expression (in mice) and that it regulates both sirtuin and TOR aging regulatory pathways. [8]
He has been highly critical of strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS), a plan to reverse and repair the damage of aging. In mid-2006 he was the lead author of a submission by a group of nine scientists to the MIT Technology Review SENS Challenge. [9] The SENS Challenge panel of judges selected this submission as the best but concluded that it failed to meet the burden of proof established by the challenge: to show that "SENS is not worthy of learned debate." Some commentators have been critical of this requirement, saying that virtually any idea is worthy of some level of learned debate, though the terms of the prize were known in advance to all participants. Estep and colleagues failed to win the $20,000 prize on offer, but Technology Review's editor, Jason Pontin, nevertheless awarded them $10,000 for their "careful scholarship". (See the "De Grey Technology Review controversy" entry for more details.) Their submission criticized the SENS plan as essentially bringing Lysenkoism to modern aging research. Estep and colleagues donated the $10,000 award to the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR).
Estep has been openly critical of SENS and of Aubrey de Grey for alleged misrepresentation of scientific evidence, and he suggests that the SENS plan does not address some of the most challenging aspects of aging including unrepaired DNA damage, noncancerous mutation and epimutation of the nuclear genome, and drift of cell and tissue-specific chromatin states. This latter damage type is generally considered a primary cause of cellular dedifferentiation and transdifferentiation, which degrade organismal function.
While critical of SENS and other anti-aging proposals, Estep is equally critical of the claim made by some in mainstream biogerontology that aging and/or death are incurable. He has challenged claimants to provide evidence for this assertion and points out the absence of evidence or physical law that might stand as a barrier to curing aging. [10] He appears to advocate mind uploading more strongly than attempting to conquer aging. [11]
In March 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Estep founded the non-profit, open-source Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC), serving as Chief Science Officer. [12] RaDVaC was founded as a self-experimentation-based, collaborative, distributed research initiative. The chitosan and peptide intranasal vaccine relies on decades of previous animal and human subject research. Estep first tested the initial vaccine on himself, and was joined by his colleagues at RaDVaC for subsequent generations of the vaccine, among which was his mentor at Harvard, George M. Church. RaDVaC makes the detailed rationale and instructions for its vaccine formulations available in a versioned white paper.
Mitochondrial DNA is the DNA located in the mitochondria organelles in a eukaryotic cell that converts chemical energy from food into adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Mitochondrial DNA is a small portion of the DNA contained in a eukaryotic cell; most of the DNA is in the cell nucleus, and, in plants and algae, the DNA also is found in plastids, such as chloroplasts.
Life extension is the concept of extending the human lifespan, either modestly through improvements in medicine or dramatically by increasing the maximum lifespan beyond its generally-settled biological limit of around 125 years. Several researchers in the area, along with "life extensionists", "immortalists", or "longevists", postulate that future breakthroughs in tissue rejuvenation, stem cells, regenerative medicine, molecular repair, gene therapy, pharmaceuticals, and organ replacement will eventually enable humans to have indefinite lifespans through complete rejuvenation to a healthy youthful condition (agerasia). The ethical ramifications, if life extension becomes a possibility, are debated by bioethicists.
Longevity may refer to especially long-lived members of a population, whereas life expectancy is defined statistically as the average number of years remaining at a given age. For example, a population's life expectancy at birth is the same as the average age at death for all people born in the same year.
Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey is an English biomedical gerontologist. He is the author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007). De Grey is known for his view that medical technology may enable human beings alive today not to die from age-related causes. As an amateur mathematician, he has contributed to the study of the Hadwiger–Nelson problem in geometric graph theory, making the first progress on the problem in over 60 years.
Calorie restriction is a dietary regimen that reduces the energy intake from foods and beverages without incurring malnutrition. The possible effect of calorie restriction on body weight management, longevity, and aging-associated diseases has been an active area of research.
Strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS) is a range of proposed regenerative medical therapies, either planned or currently in development, for the periodic repair of all age-related damage to human tissue. These therapies have the ultimate aim of maintaining a state of negligible senescence in patients and postponing age-associated disease. SENS was first defined by British biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. Many mainstream scientists believe that it is a fringe theory. De Grey later highlighted similarities and differences of SENS to subsequent categorization systems of the biology of aging, such as the highly influential Hallmarks of Aging published in 2013.
A healthy diet is a diet that maintains or improves overall health. A healthy diet provides the body with essential nutrition: fluid, macronutrients such as protein, micronutrients such as vitamins, and adequate fibre and food energy.
Brian Manning Delaney is a venture investor and researcher in the biogerontology space. Delaney is a partner at the longevity biotech venture fund Emerging Longevity Ventures. Previously he was a philosophy professor and translator of the works of Hegel. He divides his time between Stockholm and the U.S.
George McDonald Church is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, serial entrepreneur, and pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Following is a list of topics related to life extension:
Leonard Pershing Guarente is an American biologist best known for his research on life span extension in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, roundworms, and mice. He is a Novartis Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Aging in dogs varies from breed to breed, and affects the dog's health and physical ability. As with humans, advanced years often bring changes in a dog's ability to hear, see, and move about easily. Skin condition, appetite, and energy levels often degrade with geriatric age. Medical conditions such as cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, dementia, and joint conditions, and other signs of old age may appear.
Health is the state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities. This article lists major topics related to personal health.
Sirtuin 1, also known as NAD-dependent deacetylase sirtuin-1, is a protein that in humans is encoded by the SIRT1 gene.
Human Longevity, Inc. is a San Diego-based venture launched by Craig Venter and Peter Diamandis in 2013. Its goal is to build the world's most comprehensive database on human genotypes and phenotypes, and then subject it to machine learning so that it can help develop new ways to fight diseases associated with aging. The company received US$80 million in investments in its Series A offering in summer 2014 and announced a further $220 million Series B investment offering in April 2016. It has made deals with drug companies Celgene and AstraZeneca to collaborate in its research.
Steven R. Gundry is an American physician, low-carbohydrate diet author and former cardiothoracic surgeon. Gundry is the author of The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain, which promotes the controversial lectin-free diet. He runs an experimental clinic investigating the impact of a lectin-free diet on health.
Leonid Leon Peshkin is a scientist working at the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School. Peshkin's research interests include embryology, evolution and aging.
The Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC) is a non-profit, collaborative, open-source vaccine research organization founded in March 2020 by Preston Estep and colleagues from various fields of expertise, motivated to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic through rapid, adaptable, transparent, and accessible vaccine development. The members of RaDVaC contend that even the accelerated vaccine approvals, such as the FDA's Emergency Use Authorization, does not make vaccines available quickly enough. The core group has published a series of white papers online, detailing both the technical principles of and protocols for their research vaccine formulas, as well as dedicated materials and protocols pages. All of the organization's published work has been released under Creative Commons non-commercial licenses, including those contributing to the Open COVID Pledge. Multiple individuals involved with the project have engaged in self-experimentation to assess vaccine safety and efficacy. As of January 2022, the organization has developed and published twelve iterations of experimental intranasal, multivalent, multi-epitope peptide vaccine formulas, and according to the RaDVaC website, by early 2021 hundreds of individuals had self-administered one or more doses of the vaccines described by the group.
This timeline lists notable events in the history of research into senescence or biological aging, including the research and development of life extension methods, brain aging delay methods and rejuvenation.
The relationship between diet and longevity encompasses diverse research studies involving both humans and animals, requiring an analysis of complex mechanisms underlying the potential relationship between various dietary practices, health, and longevity.
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