how to look at your own telomeres

edited May 2016 in Everything else
If you took your own blood sample ( yes im qualified to do so) can you see your own telomeres under a microscope? and how expensive a microscope would you need to see your own telomeres? thank you


  • No. Light microscope aren't capable of looking at something on the order of molecules. DNA is made of many many repetitive sequences of units called nucleotides. These little units are much smaller than what we use light scopes to look at. If you use a stain you can see DNA as a whole.
  • Probably a electron microscope, don't know how DNA would handle the vacuum though....
  • edited May 2016  Can a microscope like this be great for life extension research..say with human hair follicles ( especially human hair follicles in fact ), worms, fruit flies, hydra, salmon, yeast and so on?
  • You can see hair follicles with a magnifying glass. That is just a fancy light telescope.

    That wont do DNA in the way i believe you are looking for.

    Are you looking for telemares or the other stuff you mentioned?
  • Well, you've used lots of science words, but unfortunately non that mean anything in that order. How precisely do you think looking at stuff under a microscope is going to help you with life extension research? "yes, this is in fact hair. I conclude that hair gets longer over time" Now what? Also, if you've got the cash to be throwing at a $2000 microscope, I can think of a dozen things that you'd be better off spending that on. 

    If you want to see DNA under a microscope you can extract the salivary glands of 2nd instar fruit fly larval, stain them and do a squashed preparation. It'll look like this if you do it right: LINK

    However that only works because what you're seeing is thousands of copies of dna stuck together. It's a weird quirk of their biology that they form like that. You MAY be able to see telomeres but you won't get an accurate measurement of them and this only works in a fruit fly larva. Would be useless for humans. In humans the best you can see is some vague squigally bits if you stain the DNA but you can't see it in nearly enough detail to take any precise measurements. To do any sort of work with DNA you need access to a lot of stuff and if you're planning on working with anything other than fairly common and innocuous bacteria you'll need some very expensive kit to keep your cells alive.

    TL:DR, DNA is technically visible but not in any useful way, working with this stuff is expensive and a microscope won't grant you immortality.  
  • edited May 2016
    chironex : Lets start over. Do you think its possible, is there even the smallest chance in the world, of a bright and creative individual of prolonging aging to a signifigant degree ? If not what about a collection of biohackers working together like all of you intelligent biohackers here for example working together? ( sure in both cases we have lack of funds , but that forces us all to use great creativity and not that enough?)  Are you not even trying because you know it to be impossible? thanks for your help so far and for not insulting my  lack of know-how at this point. I assure you as time passes I will be less inept. I'm learning. I have tons of textbooks i am reading but curing aging there is simply not many books on the subject so I need to experiment. maybe kind scientists like you guys/gals here can tell me how to get started on my own.  ( edit : im just going to be honest, i hate talking about this because i dont want people to see me as weakling but i am I'll in live in severe chronic pain all my life. its hard even to go to college classes. thats why i am mainly self-taught i have all tye college textbooks. everything from molecuiar biophyics to bionanotechnology. you name a class you are taking now undegraduate or graduate level i own it and have read most of tyem. none of them i have read so far tell me how to defeat aging. only things like the hayflick limit, every textbook states tyat death is inevitable ( in so many words). if aging really cant be defeated in a basement biohacking facility then my life has no meaning bevause all my life i lived without purpose. i want to live forever bevause i didnt have a normal life like you guys/gals. im just fighting to orolong my life so when they can help my chronic pain for good i can have a normal life luke everyone else. i just need to know from you guys am i fighting a losing battle trying to revetese aging with other biohackers threw experimentaton? 
  • Sorry for grammar/syntax errors. I am having trouble typing from my tablet and this forum types my words strangely for some reason, in fact this forum just doesn't work well at all with an Android tablet device. So I apologize for crappy post, however it should still make sense to you nonetheless and that's what counts. If this was the SATs I would be more careful but frankly here I only care about getting IDEAS across not my grammar, syntax, spelling, etc. Respect all :-)
  • Immortalite. Welcome to the boards and don't get discouraged if you receive a bit of criticism as we are all learners. I think you are tending to jump ahead of yourself a bit on a few things. I'm going to be critical for a second, but it's not meant to be rude or drive you off. Just hear me out.

    You began by saying you are qualified to work with blood samples. But you aren't a phlebotemist. I won't push this point but the statement gives away your age.

    Asking about the right microscope actually says you are unfamiliar with comparitive scale. Like.. what's bigger? A cell nucleus or an enzyme? Once again, whether I'm right or wrong isn't important but you are jumping ahead. It's like asking the right screwdriver for building a Cray supercomputer. Sure you may need a screwdriver but if you are asking this.. You probably aren't going to be building one.

    From here I'll jump to my point..I think Chironex does believe an individual could do something like this. Of all the people in the community he's one of the likeliest to accomplish it. I don't think he thinks YOU can. I'm not trying to speak for him or anything. This is something I believe though. But that doesnt mean you can't become the person that does it. You just have a bit more learning you need before worrying about microscopes.

    Now this isn't meant to discourage you. There are plenty of projects which I think you could do that are beneficial, but perhaps you need to start at a lower level of complexity and work up before jumping to curing aging.
  • edited May 2016
    im not saying i can cure aging. i am saying I want to help others in the search to reverse aging since i am so ill and dying myself ( i think it gives my life meaning. your not sick and dying so i just hope people have a little sypathy here. if not well thats ok, i blame society we are taught by our educational system to be coldly calculating, detached, unemotional, mean and not caring in the least. but thats anotyer topic) I need something to do and i happen to like science , love being alive and studying life extension. are the people here, like you guys, willing to get me started or do you have better things to do? what kind of labrotory equipment to buy is a start for me. i might as well buy all the advanced lab equipment first. why? because i dont have enough money to keep buying and buying and buying different kinds of equipment/supplies as my labratory skill level gets better over time, best to buy the best labratory supplies and equipment in one go. i think since eventually i will get advanced enoigh its best to have the best lab to start with. if things dont work out so what im out a huge chunk of cash , i can live with that. so defintely buy the most advanced equipment. if tyere are books you think i should buy as well ( even though i have most of them already most likely) please let me know what to buy on or otyerwise. i can also buy all my lab supplies on or 
  • ( sorry problems witg this forum for me. ) also i get the feeling, of course i coukd be wrong, that since im not some graduate student you guys think i have no right tinkering around with my own lab. I believe if anything as fellow biohackers, we as a community shoukd not be putting anyone down only trying to raise them up by trying to get everyine to cure aging...but never by insults, just correct information..which is actually what i think you guys are doing. so i thank you for that. so at this point i ask what to buy, if you think im wasting my money well so be it. perhaps since chironex is mkst qualified to cure aging in his own lab perhaos you can tell me ( if you prefer in private you can PM or email me your own home lab equipment ttat you use) how about you Cassox wouid you share what your lab is comprised of ( in private if you want or not at all if you do not wish of course. thanks guys
  • Sure. I'll let you know when I get home. I'm sure everyone would be willing to help you.
  • K so here are my thoughts on all this. First, if you're dying, you should be focusing on the thing that's killing you, not just general life extension as there is a very large difference. This isn't a comic book where you get wolverine powers and get a 2 for one cure to cancer and immortality. 

    As to your claim that you've read every book, I seriously doubt it. This isn't a bad thing. You aren't a weakling for not knowing, you're simply learning. So don't claim you have knowledge you don't have to sound tough, you'll get more respect at least from me if you're honest. If you need it explained why a microscope won't let you see DNA, you haven't done enough reading yet. That said I can appreciate the want to learn outside of a school environment. I'm overwhelmingly self taught and have taught myself everything from nuclear physics to semiconductor manufacturing to nanotechnology and lots more. These things aren't impossible to learn on your own, they just take a lot of time and knowing where to look. Which I'll happily point you in the right direction, see more below.

    The hayflick limit is only the limit for a typical cell. Any immortalized cell line can far surpass the hayflick limit but the longer they keep replicating the more genetic damage they have so after generation 50-100 they are so deformed that you can see it almost immediately. HeLa cells can get very narly after a while but they keep on replicating just fine. One of the ways to extend the limit is something like telomere extension which Bioviva is investigating. Also, stem cells can happily keep dividing and dividing and understanding how they do that is where most of the research is focused. Also think about all of biology. It started with a handful of cells which replicated billions and billions of times over billions of years to make you, me and everything else. There is clearly a mechanism that allows cells to replicate indefinitely, it's just working that into a single individual is very hard.

    One idea on giving the body a chance at living longer is blood scrubbing. Basically you release nanoparticles (my fireflies would be good for this) into your blood and have them bind to any old or damaged cells. The particles are magnetic so as they pump the blood out of you and through a machine, all the damaged cells are pulled out using a magnet leaving all the healthy and fresh cells to circulate back into your blood stream. My nanites will eventually be able to do full reconstructive surgery and molecular delivery but only as soon as I can get into a decent lab to develop them further. So between blood scrubbing and the many other things i'll be making them do, nanites are a pretty damn good candidate for serious life extension and a revolution in medicine, but I digress. 

    There are a lot of specifics I could get into about how to extend life but whole courses can and should be made on the topic and it's more than I should put in a single post.

    As to the contents of a lab, to do the sort of things that would be required to do any serious life extension work, the list is extensive and would run a tab in the hundreds of thousands easily. You need everything to work with cells which is a massive list on it's own, full chemistry gear and a very wide range of chemicals and reagents, some of which get very expensive on their own. You'd need a full workshop to build the machines needed to control the nanites. You'd need and AFM (atomic force microscope) and a TEM (transmission electron microscope)  (the first costs a minimum of 10000, the later costs a minimum of 250,000 (usually way more)). You'll need DNA synthesizing equipment, and sequencing equipment, although you could send out for a lot of this, the amount you'd need to make would almost justify just buying the damn machine. I could go on but at this point I think I've made my point. My lab is the beginnings of all of that. I've got some basic machine and tooling, a lot of chemistry equipment and then a host of stuff I've spent years building myself. 

    So where do you go from all this? where do you start? well, I would start with a book called the human body book. It's not a textbook but while I was skimming it I noticed you could've compressed pretty much my whole degree and it would've been that book. Not super detailed but it makes visualizing everything a lot easier. Then, watch crash course on youtube. It's a great channel and will give you a deeper insight into how biology works. Maybe check out their chemistry series and some of the others. I would also look at khan acadamy. They have lots of great stuff. Also, get lost on wikipedia and do it often. It won't give you all the knowledge you need but it'll give you ideas and questions and that's what's important. Once you have those ideas and questions, hop onto scihub and start reading papers. As many as you can. Read about how crispr works, read the papers on the protocol for using it. Read about how you make nanoparticles, or feel free to go onto my youtube channel and you can watch me make, and take you through the process of making nanoparticles. 

    Even if you don't want to take a university course it is really helpful to get experience in a more legitimate lab. The reports are hell and it'll feel like a waste of time but you learn a work ethic and a way of handling yourself which would take much longer to cultivate on your own. You also get experience using equiptment which as you could probably tell by now, is hard to come by on your own. amazon and carolina are fine, but you'll never be able to afford a $60,000 inverted transmission flouroscent microscope with mutliple wavelengths. A school though, they'll have 6-7 for you to use. 

    And if all this feels overwhelming, school is nice because they do most of the leg work and put together a nice course for you to follow. To do this on your own takes far more work and curiosity and time.

  • edited May 2016
    Wouldn't just running a complete DNA profile make more sense? Like break down the entire human DNA, I believe they use that for proving someone has rare genetic disorders.
  • edited May 2016
    I didnt mean to say i read every textbook, lol. that was obviously just a joke plus i dont sleep as well as your average person because i live in severe chronic pain, i didnt mean to say that. i do already own the body book you mentioned, no joke i own it and its awesome. fantastically illustrated! I will start reading and memorizing all of the human anatomy. thanks guys

    I would love to see your youtube videos, and everyone elses science youtube videos if other people here have them. I love to watch all kinds of videos. Liz Parrish, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Maria Konovalenko, Eternal Life Fan Club ( less academic more for just fans of eternal life. Roen Horn is an activist. he records whats going on in the immortality community, like with Zoltan Istvan and his Immortality Bus.  ) About your nanites chironex how long until you think you can get into a decent lab to get your results? i would love to see what happens when you develop them further with a good lab. let me know when you do for sure.

    does anyone have any pics of their biohacker spaces? it wouod just be cool tonsee
  • edited May 2016
    JohnDoe : One of my first at home lab experiments i woukd like to run a complete DNA profile. im sure i can find a book on how to test my own bloodwork to see if i have any rare genetic disorders. i have drawn blood before ( just to see if i could do it without passing out. i did it first year of college) from myself , now i just need to do somethimg with tye blood once i have done it.
  • you can't do that at home. There are a variety of sites that offer services like that such as 23 and me 
  • ok. chironex do you have a youtube channel?
  • edited May 2016
    Ya it's called "the thought emporium". I've also got a website, facebook page and instagram thing all under the same name. 

    Youtube LINK
    Website LINK
    Facebook LINK
    Instagram LINK
  • edited May 2016
    AWESOME!!! Is there anyone else on this forum trying to defeat aging besides you? There seems to be many people here doing body modifications, tattoos, implanted chips, etc. but I haven't come across any life extension students, or non-students but rather just amateur biohackers, who are interested in curing aging at home threw hard work, creativity, ingenuity. chironex i have a question for you: if someone who was say a college drop-out ( i went to tyree years college in psych before i got ill but thats completely irrelevant to this hypothetical situation) or didn't even go to college maybe they were just self taught in all they right areas. Maybe they just knew all the correct things to study and didn't waste their time studying all the things that would get in their way of defeating aging. anyway if someone who dropped out of college , like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs ( i believe they dropped-out anyway) i also read about former prodigious computer hackers that are now making millions working for the NSA and other securiry agencies, employing their skills to make lots of money they learned from being blackhat hackers. well lets say ( not talking about me by the way ) some genius savant biohacker teenager in his basement actually cured aging before everyone without the long college education you had, all that minimum wage work you had to do to pay for your college, all the long hours you put in for homework, that somehow he just got lucky and of course being a savant didnt hurt his chances either of course. anyway would you get really upset or be really happy for him/her for finally defeating such an important , one could say THE most important disease that has plagued humanity since the beginning of us homo sapiens? Or do you think you would get insanely jealous or upset that you didn't get to it first. Take that professor recently for example that committed suicide because of that published academic paper he did on life extension that contained some errors in it?
  • edited May 2016

    Or insanely jealous/envious like Salieri in the film Amadeus. Have you ever seen it? Read the review by Roger Ebert if you haven't, the review itself tells the story of what we all of struggle with..a bit of envy and jealousy. I mean there has to be someone you look up to and wish you were as great as , perhaps Dr. Aubrey de Grey ? Who is your hero in the field of radical life extension?

    Anyway instead of the music just replace the word with immortality in the Amadeus review( I think immortality is possible until proven otherwise. That is not dead which can eternal lie, and yet with strange aeons even death may die. -Lovecraft ) I just hope you are not like that orofessor tyat killed himseld recently because his published paper had some mistakes in it. i especially you root for whever cures desth, i know i will and i hope you do soon. to me tyat will be tge most impoetant day in all of histort...achieving immortality !!!hurrah!!!
  • I'm not trying to defeat aging. I' trying to make the world a better place and to advance the worlds technology as best I can. The overwhelming extension to lifespan is just part of all that. And would I be mad if someone else was doing what I do? No, not at all. If they were doing something amazing I'd want to meet them. Besides, if they published I'd just adapt their formula to my own needs and move on to another project. There's plenty I'd like to do but life extension has to come first for obvious reasons. If I've got all the time in the world to work, there's very little I can't conceivably do. So they'd just save me going to the trouble of figuring it out. I'd much rather be building an iron man suit or improving my nanites or creating new species. But I digress. I don't follow many people, if any in that crowd. Most life extension groups are full of way too much woo for my taste. Bioviva was the most interesting I've seen thus far. 
  • edited May 2016
    dude..*high fives chironex*. you're the man. Do you have any academic papers on the Study Budy i can read? i woukd like to learn more. 

    edit : i ask for more information because I wonder if the Study Budy is nothing more the a neurofeedback device just repackaged and sold to those that dont know anything about neurofeedback/biofeedback devives? what are the difference, if any, from a neurofeedback/ biofeedback device from tge Study Budy? feel free to send me papers at my email on the differnces : [email protected] or post here if you want. 

  • There's a big link on the study buddy page that leads to a whole page of papers and sources
  • edited May 2016
    Curing aging is not something you can feasibly do as a layperson at home. It just isn't, sorry to be harsh.

    What we call aging is a mix of problems that come as side effects of normal metabolism, you need to attack all the problems together and that's hard.

    It's why I sometimes donate money to SENS (see for details) - these guys have a workable plan and have already had some results.
  • edited May 2016
    possibly. im still not going to give up. im actually starting biochem now, like Cassox said it may be feasable i just need more learning.i am actually researching with hydra and starfish now at my home lab because of their regeneration properties. i actually think if more people did at home lab working on anti.aging we coukd cure it even sooner. im just really stubburn. not going to give up. a lot of innovators faced negative public feedback e.g Henry Ford, Alexander Bell, Wright Brothers, so im good.
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