how to live two years longer using your cell phone - alex backer - h+ summit @ harvard
Post on 21-Oct-2014
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Alex Backer Ph.D. Founder and CEO, ab|inventio, the invention factory behind QLess, Whozat, SocialDiligence.com and MyNew.tv Why We Age, How Aging is Good For You, How to Live Two Years Longer Using Your Cell Phone & Beyond Alex's talk will be divided in three parts. The first will explain the selective advantage of aging, or why biology evolved a genetic program to age. The second will teach you how to live two years longer using your cell phone. The third will make a specific proposal to extend lifespan: that of redundant organs with failover systems with real-time wireless sensing devices for monitoring, repair and replacement. A scientist, inventor and entrepreneur, Alex Backer represented his country twice at the International Olympiads of Informatics. Alex holds a degree in Biology and Economics from MIT, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems and Biology from the California Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the Dean’s award for ‘great contributions and outstanding qualities of Leadership and Responsibility’. He has held positions at McKinsey & Co., the Department of Computational Biology and Evolutionary Computing at the Center for Computation, Computers, Information and Mathematics of Sandia National Labs, and the Biology Division of Caltech. He is the founder of Adapt Technologies™, a pioneer of search engine marketing technology, abinventio™, the invention factory, QLess™, an award-winning wireless solution that has saved more than three hundred thousand users from standing in line at DMVs, retail stores of Fortune 100 companies, restaurants, shopping malls, doctors' offices, colleges and salons across two continents, Whozat™, The People Search Engine™, named one of the 100 hottest start-ups in the world by TechCrunch, a semantic search engine with machine vision, and which beat Google and every other search engine tested 3 to 1 or more in results relevance in a blind people search comparison, and Social Diligence™, which offers the first resume- or file-based search engine, capable of scouring the web for information related to any document. Alex was appointed by the President to serve in the California Institute of Technology's Information Sciences and Technology Board of Advisors. Alex has been an invited speaker at numerous conferences on diverse science and technology topics around the world. Alex and his creations have been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Business Week, CNET, Mashable, and many other leading publications. Alex is always looking for world-class entrepreneurial people to help bring about innovation through technology.TRANSCRIPT
Why we age, and how to extend your enjoyable lifespan by 2 years using your cell phone
Alex Backer, Ph.D.
Founder & CEO
ab|invenGo, the invenGon factory
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Animals have a GeneGc Program to Age
• If you knock aging genes off, a worm will live twice as long.
Leni Guarente (MIT), Cori Bargmann (UCSF), Cynthia Kenyon (UCSF), Javier Apfeld (Harvard)
Aging makes you fiZer
• Knocking out a gene is easy for evoluGon to do.
• These animals evolved to age, i.e. genomes of animals with the aging gene outcompeted those without it.
• Why? How?
EvoluGon has opGmized the geneGc distance between generaGons
• Too liZle variaGon, and evoluGon is too slow and species cannot adapt to changing environments fast enough.
• Too much, and most progeny will not survive.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree -‐-‐but it can’t fall too close, either.
The opGmal geneGc distance between generaGons varies with fitness & environmental change
• The happier you are in your environment, the less incenGve to change your genes for your progeny
• The more the environment has changed since your genes were tested growing up, and the more trouble you are having, the more a genome should be willing to experiment with change
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Gametes accrue mutaGons over a
GeneGc distance between generaGons increases with parents’ age
Stress induces Aging
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• But if there is an opGmal geneGc distance between generaGons & if geneGc distance between generaGons increases with parents’ age...
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Then maGng must occur during a given age range
• It follows that maGng must iniGally increase and then decrease with age
• MaGng indeed decreases with age by:– Aging-‐related inability to mate (menopause)
– Aging-‐related decrease in aZracGveness
– Aging-‐related decrease in libido
– Aging-‐related death
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• But if the old’s progeny are less fit, why not let natural selecGon take care of them instead of aging their parents?
Most of animal
evoluGon happened while living in closely related clans
• The old parents’ progeny’s inferior fitness may not be evident unGl later in life, while they consume resources (parenGng, food, …) that reduce their fiZer siblings’ chance of survival.
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So now that we now why we age, can we do anything to extend our enjoyable lifeGme?
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The average American spends two years of her life wai7ng in line
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We’ve Been Standing in Line for at least 3 Millennia
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waiGnginlinesucks.com
• During the duraGon of the World Cup, QLess will offer all new customers who menGon H+ 2 installaGons for the price of 1, and will donate 50% of the associated revenues toward research that can help prolong enjoyable life
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Gehng the human body to achieve 100% upGmeLessons from soiware
• QLess has a greater than 99.99% upGme record -‐-‐never down for more than 3 min
• Can’t the human body achieve the same?
• The secret is redundancy
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Proposing redundant organs for all vital organs by 2020, with failover systems with
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CiGzen Science
• Scientific publishing is outdated.• The world needs a wikipedia for
original research, where:– Publication dissociated from peer review– Live documents can be continually updated– Publon as small as its author deems it– Ideas can see the light of day sooner– Everybody can contribute
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Introducing...
everybodyscience.org
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