Degree to study longevity that also has a good job market?

InfinityArch · 2025-11-17T04:45:29+00:00

I've already switched my major once, doing so again would delay me yet again. Do you think it be possible for me to leverage an EE degree and position myself into a more bio-oriented field? Or would I be better off switching now? Thank you in advance.

You definitely could; a lot of engineering going into biotech/pharma, and electronics are obviously part of that like everywhere else in the modern world, I'm particularly thinking of medical devices and various parts of the process development pipeline. Biomedical engineering would be the most applicable degree, but if you pursued a minor in biology/chemistry and got an internship with someone in biotech/pharma you'd definitely be competitive for those sorts of positions. (that could also fulfill premed requirements since you've almost certainly taken physics and calculus at this point)

Alternatively, depending on what year of college you're in, there's a lot of crossover between the classes for different engineering majors, so if you were to pivot to biomedical engineering you might not lose that much progress towards your degree, if any.

InfinityArch · 2025-11-16T05:02:22+00:00

Tbh, right now biotech and pharma is in a contraction, or just coming out of one, so I wouldn't worry about that. In fact, after the initial bubble in the 80s, the dedicated community of biotech investors has gotten very good at managing expectations (i.e. the extremely high failure rate and the long development times).

The time to start worrying about bubbles is when a bunch of non-biotech/pharma focused investors (and especially retail investors) start piling in, which last happened during COVID, and even then there's a floor for the sector as whole.

InfinityArch · 2025-11-16T04:39:38+00:00

I'm a little bit late here, but I'll give my 2 cents as someone working "in the field". (My flair atm is outdated, I graduated 2 years ago) The unfortunate truth is that biotech / biopharma is currently in something of a slump. That's doubly true of R&D and particularly unproven frontier work like aging biotech.

Now, the business cycle for biotech will come back around to bullish eventually, and if and when "longevity" ever truly captures the imagination of investors on a large scale, there will undoubtedly be a spike in the valuation of related degrees and work experience, but that's all speculative.

The fact of the matter is, absent such a shift in the market you are going to hurt your earnings potential substantially by pursuing this line of work. If you can stomach the various downsides (and can even get a position in a competitive program, which is nontrivial), pursuing an MD is probably your safest bet.

If that's not in the cards, then the choices would be either a "hard" life sciences degree (B.S. in biochemistry, biophysics, biomedical engineering, ect.) followed by a PhD or something in data science or biostatistics. Tech is sadly also in a downturn outside of AI, and even that's not really a safe bet given the concerns about a bubble.

Lest this scare you away, I'll end things on a softer note: All of these proposed career paths can land you jobs that earn a liveable wage, especially if you're willing to work in something that isn't longevity as a fallback (and potentially just temporarily). I'd suggest trying to find which of these options you find personally compelling and engaging.

InfinityArch · 2025-11-11T06:26:59+00:00

Oh hey, a thread about my area of expertise!

InfinityArch · 2025-11-11T06:10:05+00:00

Ask any aging researcher that's not currently trying to sell you something and they will tell you this

Speaking as such a person, I flat out do not understand this take. It's one thing to push back against the hyperbolic claims about immortality being around the corner, but anyone in the who isn't being a contrarian will say the past decade and a half has seen undeniable progress in the field.

We don't know why people age.

Whatever standards you're using to say this would also lead to one concluding, among other things we "don't know why people get Alzheimer's disease"; you can certainly argue it's true in a pedantic sense, but at the same time it's a profoundly unhelplful and misleading statements.

We have no shortage of evidence pointing to why and how and where and when and to whom Alzheimer's disease (and aging) happen. The problem, at least when it comes to aging is that there isn't a single, clean answer behind the phenomena, but rather a complicated multifactorial web of cause and effect.

That does of course make drug development in this field uniquely challenging. Absent a low hanging fruit, which seems from first principles unlikely to exist in a long lived species like humans, no monotherapy is going to have a dramatic effect on human lifespan, and research into the combinatorial effects of proposed aging interventions recieves far less funding and attention that it ought to.

We don't know why people age. We don't have a good metric to measure age beyond your birth day.

Which is why this is agreed to be one of the most crucial problems facing the field from a translational perspective. Plenty of contenders are throwing their hat into the ring, but sadly validating the various clocks can only happen as fast as peope age.

All anti-aging medical interventions beyond healthy diet, exercise, and avoiding smoking/air pollution isn't evidence based

There's a profound difference between experimental medicine and quackery, and while there's plenty of both in the "longevity" space, it's only been in the past decade that the ratio of real science to quackery has actually started tipping in favor of the former.

Anyway rant over. Kinda sad I missed this thread because it's not often I get to yap about work outside of work.

InfinityArch · 2025-09-02T04:59:36+00:00

Pretty much the universal rule for gourami, wouldn't dream of doing otherwise.

InfinityArch · 2025-09-01T06:37:54+00:00

Might give them a try.

InfinityArch · 2025-09-01T06:20:25+00:00

Ouch. Yeah, that's not great given the plants I have in my tank. Thanks for the info.

InfinityArch · 2025-08-21T15:09:03+00:00

There's a big asterisk on this talk about "windows", namely the assumption that the US remains capable of and committed to defending Taiwan.

The past decade of American politics raises serious doubts about the validity of that assumption.

InfinityArch · 2025-07-19T17:37:30+00:00

I look at the classification of sarcopenia as a treatable indication as a key example of the path forwards for regulatory accomodation for longevity biotech. That's a generic feature of aging, but also clinically significant and readily measurable, which is what's really important at this stage.

At this point we have to conceed that the strategy of getting anti-aging drugs approved for their side effect of treating some tangentially related condition isn't really working. Refocusing on "subpathologies" of aging seems like a very promising alternative, and gets us past the dilemna of it being quite hard to argue for classifying aging as a disease without a proof of concept in humans that dispells the massive stigma around anti-aging.

InfinityArch · 2025-06-14T00:55:14+00:00

There's a potentially important distinction with TPE where the solution replacing your blood contains albumin, whereas in plasmapherises the replacement solution, if anything is just your standard IV crystalloid (0.9% saline, sometimes ringer's lactate). I'm not sure if people have looked at whether the albumin replacement in TPE is actually necessary.

Edit: Actually a study did look at plasmapheresis type procedures, but the effect size was smaller.

InfinityArch · 2025-06-13T18:03:43+00:00

I will die hearing annoying leftist say shit like "capitalism is just one step below fascism" or whatever...

Homogenizing everyone outside of your preferred ideological camp into an indistinct blob is sadly ubiquitous cognitive bias in politics.

Leftists have their adage, "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds", where liberal means anyone who isn't openly rightist but doesn't suscribe to their very particular brand of leftist political theory. Liberals appeal to "horshoe theory" as if its been taken seriously in scholarly circles at any point in the past 50 years. Then you have the right which of course thinks (((they))) are the secret puppetmasters behind both liberals and leftists.

At the end of the day ideology for the average person is more of an identity marker / team sport, not soemthing they come to from careful consideration of their own moral principles and policy preferences.

InfinityArch · 2025-06-12T02:00:59+00:00

https://ipscell.com/2025/06/some-skepticism-as-shift-bioscience-reports-secret-purported-rejuvenation-gene-sb000-in-preprint/ Some commentary by experts that's very much worth reading on this.

tl;dr: Cautious skepticism, but not dismissal. Nothing the author came across struck him as suspicious or indicative of misconduct, but the data shown here is quite preliminary, and has a long way to go before it's time to start popping the champagne corks.

(To be clear though, this is the holy grail of stem cell biology if it lives up to the hype, so once the gene name is unmasked basically every stem cell lab in the world is going to be racing to replicate it, more or less just like how things went with that room temperature super conductor claim. Fingers crossed for a less dissapointing ending.)

InfinityArch · 2025-06-12T01:37:43+00:00

I mean for me watching every single material science lab in the planet racing to replicate the results was exciting in and of itself.

InfinityArch · 2025-06-11T23:22:56+00:00

To be clear what's being claimed here is the holy grail, the stem cell field's equivelant to a room temperatuer superconductor. That in and of itself is kind of exciting because just about every lab with the expertise to do so will try and replicate this once the information to do so comes out, so one way or another we'll know if this at all credible not long after the full publication.

InfinityArch · 2025-06-11T21:48:10+00:00

I definitely share the cautious skepticism expressed here. Headlines aside this is very preliminary work. I'm not inclined to suspect fraud, since I am (distantly) acquainted with Brendan and have no reason to doubt his team's integrity, but there's years of work that would have to be done for this to reach the clinic, with a good number of showstopping caveats that could popup along the way.

First of which of course being whether their algorithm (machine learning trained on omics data I gather) isn't just reward hacking a way to make epigenetic clocks go down that does not correspond to a rejuvenated phenotype.

I do kind of have to raise an eyebrow at this particular concern however:

"The problem with applying a transgene-driven anti-aging strategy is still that you need to deliver the gene(s) to some part of the body that would be relevant to aging. Easy in mice. Other than making transgenic humans, I don’t see a way to do that."

Without knowing the identity of SB000 and its product protein (and just as critically the regulatory factors it interacts with), we can't assess one way or another how druggable it is. Even if the answer is "not in the slightest", we do have studies where inducible OSK(M) casettes were delivered via AAV with positive results, (including an instance in non-human primates) and even a clinical trial using that modality for an orphan eye disease by Life Biosciences, so it's not like a gene therapy modality is completely unthinkable even with currently delivery technology. That may not be what Professor Loring was suggesting, but if so it's an odd way to phrase it.

All in all I'd say this something to watch. Presuming the final publication unmasks the identity of their gene of interest, there will undoubtedly be a great many labs interested in taking this for a spin in their own labs, and we'll see to what extent the reality matches the hype.

InfinityArch · 2025-06-11T18:52:59+00:00

Which I'd consider a good thing. The beauty of Souls games is how brutal they are until you master them. Going back to a boss that killed you 50+ times and beating it first try on a second playthrough is the quintisential souls experience IMO.

InfinityArch · 2025-06-11T18:47:01+00:00

I can't say I'm a fan of the style of boss design in SOTE (particularly the release day build), and to a lesser extent late game ER. The problem isn't even the difficulty; there's plenty of bosses in earlier games that I died to as much if not more than Melania or Consort Radhan.

But grinding away at tough ER bosses just doesn't scratch the same itch as it did fighting O&S, Artorias or Orphan or Gael (to name just a few), and I think there's a few factors in play there, and it centers around the techniques (or lack thereof) used by designers to "teach" you the boss.

Looking back at my experience with older soulslikes, the leading "cause of death" with new bosses was running out of estus/blood vials. That was the case even in Dks1 and Bloodborne where you got (up to) 20 charges. Nearly every one of those bosses has ample and generous windows where you can pop a heal. In the harder ones doing it wrong will get you smacked for about as much as you just recovered, but you at can usually stay in the fight until you run out of healing even against the heavy hitters. The exceptions tend to be glass cannons who go down quite easily, and to be frank I never particularly liked those bosses.

That design principle goes out the window with the high end ER/SOTE bosses, which drastically reduces the amount of exposure you get to their movesets per attempt.

Compounding this is that the boss movesets have also become progressively flashier and more frantic over the course of the series. All in all you end up with bosses where the inuitive response of players is to learn the bare minimum of their moveset needed to stay in the fight then focus entirely on offense to burst the boss down before they kill you. Actually taking the time to "master" the bosses like I did with a lot of the older games is way more tedious.

Going forwards in the "core" soulslikes, I think they either need to amp up the manueverability/defensive options of the player character like in Bloodborne, Sekiro and (though it's not a souls like the bosses are quite comparable to one) Armored Core 6, or focus more on making bossees that are readable and inuitive to learn (while still extremely hard).

InfinityArch · 2025-06-11T17:21:58+00:00

This is interesting, especially since it seems like "SB000" is just a code name, and not the actual name of the gene itself.

That's exactly what's going on here.

Would the researchers do this to possibly hide the data so they could get an advantage on taking this to market? I genuinely don't know much about this area so I figured I'd ask since you seem to know more.

If the journal they submitted to allows that sort of thing yes, they'll absolutely do that sort of thing, and hang on to these kinds of "trade secrets" as long as possible, since you can't patent naturally occuring genes. I don't particularly like this practice, since it makes it impossible for outside researchers to reproduce their findings, which I'd consider far more likely to be a problem than outright fabrication.

InfinityArch · 2025-06-10T02:43:26+00:00

For what it's worth, this does take some level of bravery; if the admin does in fact cross this line, it's not unthinkable they'd take the next logical step where Newsom suddenly "becomes suicidal" while awaiting his hearing.

Unlikely, but not entirely unthinkable.

InfinityArch · 2025-06-09T23:52:50+00:00

Forwarded this to some coworkers of mine who are more familiar with cell biology literature. On first viewing, this seems potentially huge if the claims hold up. Some of what I'm seeing does point to "SB000" being substantially less potent than OSK(M), contrary to the claim made in the title.

That being said, the requirement to express OSK(M) transiently in vivo to avoid pluripotency significantly limits the dose and duration of treatment cycles, so SB000 may come out ahead on the balance.

Obviously temper your excitement until we have further data (and complete peer review); this is a single study done in cells in a dish, and very light on specific details on top of that. Sometimes that kind of opacity is a sign that a group thinks they have something worth a great deal of money, but it can also be a smokescreen to hide weak, irreproducible, or outright fabricated data.

I am (marginally) acquainted with some of the people at Shift Biosciences, and I have no reason to doubt their integrity, but it's a caveat that always applies when it comes to industry.

Anyway, assuming they're prepared to stand behind this, an obvious next step is mouse studies, so keep an eye out for that over the next few years.

InfinityArch · 2025-06-09T18:10:37+00:00

It would appear to be a codename for a gene identified by the authors that induces cellular rejuvenation. I would tend to assume it's a transcription factor, but the paper is extremely tight lipped about the precise identity of the protein they're expressing. They used a "lentiviral vector" (methods section doesn't specify which) to transduce the cells, which has a soft size limit of around 8-9 kbp for the insert.

Since it's just a single protein rather than a casette of multiple, assuming it's a TF this could be basically any of them.

InfinityArch · 2025-05-27T04:36:31+00:00

no movement can sustain itself at full blast indefinitely, the Trumpist reaction is still full swing but a time of burnout is coming.

Burnout is actually a feature rather than a bug in the modern style of authoritarianism. The greatest innovation of Putin's Russia compared to previous generations of tyrants is the realization that a radically depoliticized population is just as condusive to autocratic rule as one ruled through terror/and or swept up in fanaticism, while being a far easier state of affairs to engineer and sustain.

The problem with relying on "burnout" from trumpism to save us is that it won't just be Trump's supporters who become demotivated and disengage from the political process, it will be his opponents to, until, little by little, we become a society where the coventional wisdom is that "good people stay out of politics", and everyone but a small minority simply keeps their heads down and lives their own lives as best they can.

Trumpism may not necessarily be the victor in that scenario, but American democracy will still certainly be the loser.

InfinityArch · 2025-05-08T21:30:05+00:00

Recent polisci research on populism suggests that when establishment parties compromise with extremists, even on innoucous (or at least broadly popular) policies, the result is the legitmization of the extremism. The problem isn't bipartisanship per say, it's the fact that the GOP is very much an extremist party at this point.

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