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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

So how can I, as a software developer, meaningfully contribute to this area? I would very much prefer to live forever.

Competitive advantage says that in the vast majority of cases you should do more or less what you're doing now, perhaps adjust your behaviour to optimise for compensation, and spend/donate money to have more biologists work on this. This is very general advice for anyone with a cause that they would like to get done without regard to who does it.

It's only true when money is the bottleneck.

It's true as long as you personally are not particularly suited to widen the bottleneck. Which is most of the time.

In this particular case, it's very unlikely a typical dev would contribute more by taking a few years off to learn biology and maths and statistics, instead of just making money and paying someone who has already spent that time.

No, money is not the answer and just paying money is just plain boring. Especially when guys like Bezos have already put $3B into this. My donations would be a drop in the ocean.

I want to do something meaningful myself.

Bioinformatics is a huge field and a lot of software developers are working there. It's science with multi-year career paths, so you cannot just start working on everything without learning the basics first. But with a bit of training, many former software developers have contributed as lab techs, PhD students or other types of associates.

You could gain computational biology experience from working at biotech until you have enough to work at one of these longevity startups.

This is exactly what I'm doing - working at a bioinformatics startup as a SDE, and slowly picking up comp bio projects.

I guess you could dive into the world of home-brew biohacking? Understanding genetics and lab techniques doesn't seem out of reach for programmer types, but I don't really know.

I tried it (shoutout to The Odin's biohacking courses!) but I found it requires a lot more manual skills than I was used to from programming. Not out of reach but quite different, the most similar existing skill for me was actually cooking. Though I never made it past beginner stage, so take my experience for what it's worth.

In an ideal world, biology salaries would be on par with tech salaries, so more intelligent ambitious young people will pursue education and careers in biology.

I'm personally not driven by money and never was. First and foremost I would like to make the world a better place.

most leading biohackers have a patreon or subscribestar page where you could help fund their research, that might be a start.

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