1. Use personalized medicine services. Get a lot of data about the state of your own body.
First of all, it’s various “omics”: genome, transcriptome, epigenome, proteome and metabolome. You can do a $100 23andme test, or a half million dollar analysis the way Dr. Michael Snyder from Stanford University did. He was measuring 40,000 his own biological parameters for quite a long while.
2. Participate in clinical trials of geroprotector drug candidates. Several pharmacologic drugs are now known to extend lifespan in animals. The time of human clinical trials has come. Another option for those who doesn’t want to participate themselves is to support such studies financially and organizationally.
3. Personalized science – treat your health as a scientific task. You should identify the existing and potential pathologies in your body and figure out a way to treat and prevent them.
Right now the elements of personalized science are used in treating oncological diseases: people do cancer cell genome sequencing and compare it to the genome of a healthy cell to identify what went wrong and led to the diseases. They also do experiments with the tumor by transplanting it into mice to identify the drugs that may work for the particular patient. This basically means that experiments are done to tackle the problem of a given person. To stay healthy it is a good idea to start fighting those diseases that haven’t yet manifested and try to avoid it.
4. Organize scientific research. Steve Jobs wasn’t treating his cancer during the first several months; he was relying on yoga and meditation. What he should have done was building an institute for bioengineering pancreas and liver and engage in scientific studies. There are a lot of great experiments that need to be organized, for example, studying integrated longevity gene therapy, or one can become a citizen-scientist and build a lab at home and test geroprotector candidates in old mice.
5. Be friends with people with no harmful habits, who are on low calorie diets, physically active and interested in science. Be yourself that way.
6. Create crowdfunding campaigns in the area of longevity. Researchers need a lot of money to do good science. Studies into the phenomenon of life extension and basic mechanisms of aging have paltry funding. We need to advertise the work of scientists that will save millions of lives with the help of crowdfunding platforms.
7. Increase your own competence. Knowledge quite literally extends lifespan. The mechanism of this is not clear yet, but maybe it is due to neurogenesis. New neurons are formed in our brains, but if we don’t use them to form new knowledge, they die. Perhaps it is best to study molecular biology, because this kind of knowledge can be applied to your own health.
8. Sign a cryocontract for neuropreservation and leave as much information about you as possible.
9. Promote the value of human longevity. Public opinion defines government policy. It is necessary to make the government realize the main right of every citizen – the right to live. Aging kills the majority of the people. Various social institutions have to understand this and start solving this problem.