How to help work on longevity

Learn basic biology

Read Molecular Biology of the Cell. Follow Nature, Science and Cell (eLife, PNAS and PLOS might be better from an Open Access perspective). 

Join an iGEM team (you can find ones in your area here) and hone your experimental skills.

Note: If you are under 18 can’t afford a copy of Molecular Biology of the Cell, email me.

Understand how the industry works

Subscribe to FierceBiotech and LifeSciVC, and read Peter Kolchinsky’s writing. Read ‘The Billion Dollar Molecule’ and ‘The Antidote’ by Barry Werth, as well as ‘Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech’ by Sally Smith Hughes. 

Join a lab

Join an aging lab or a lab that will teach you an in-demand experimental technique (for example, a top proteomics lab). Build up your understanding of the field by reading reviews and going to local conferences. BAAM is a good conference for aging biology in the Bay Area.

Join a company

If you don’t know anything about biology but want to work in a scientific role, I’d recommend building a portfolio of work by doing basic analyses on public datasets. Check out 1000 Genomes, GEO, or LINCS. Look at papers that use those databases, download a small portion of the data, and start playing around with some basic models. Even if you only reproduce an already published model, the act of working with sequencing data or molecular structures is a good start.

Start a company

If you want to start a longevity startup, I'd love to hear from you!