It didn't occur to me how significant this was. The number of hours that I had is perhaps as small as the number of hours that most people have by age 10. In hindsight it's obvious: of course I didn't have good social skills relative to other adults, in the same way that a 10 year old doesn't have good social skills for an adult. I just hadn't put nearly enough time in!

Just out of curiosity - do you think that all other people who put massive amounts of time into socializing get benefits that are proportionate to the amount of time put in? From our point of view, most people spend incredibly high amounts of time socializing, but does this make each and every one of them socially savvy to the same extent?

Also, what do you think of https://www.quora.com/How-did-successful-people-spend-their-time-when-they-were-young-between-ages-of-10-and-22/answer/Auren-Hoffman ?

What about something like this? http://nyscf.org/images/pdf/biopsy_flyer_versionweb.pdf?study_id=17&participant_id=51644acd8255dc3ede4fa494b7def28831554d6a . I'm not sure if they'd store the samples at a timescale long enough to be relevant though (aka, 4+ decades).

How important is it, though, that the cells be your own cells? In several decades, we may have even better tools to deal with the transplant rejection that stems from regenerated organs with different genomic material.

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FWIW here is a relevant article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10295085/Stem-cell-banks-enable-wealthy-to-free-backup-version-of-their-adult-selves.html

Okay, I actually went and looked at the papers and followed a chain of citations back until I found where they are actually getting the protein.

Looks like my assessment was unnecessarily pessimistic. Those that I could find the source of their proteins who studied this protein in isolation seem to have bought a recombinant product from Peprotech, a biotech company that sells huge numbers of proteins. Their website (http://www.peprotech.com/en-US/Pages/Product/Recombinant_Human_GDF-11/120-11) seems to indicate that it is being produced in E. coli. I suspect they have altered the gene a bit to only produce the part cut by the protease that is active and may be doing some post-processing to get it folded right since they indicate that it comes as a dimer held together by disulfide bonds which have a hard time forming in bacterial cytosol. I suspect there's a bunch of industrial techniques and optimization going on in there that we in the research labs don't bother with in favor of doing things faster with more complicated or versatile small scale systems.

EDIT: and now I found this http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0085890 in which just this year someone managed to screw up the redox metabolism of bacteria such that you can more easily express proteins that form disulfide bonds in the cytosol of bacteria without the need for expensive post-processing to get the bonds right. One of a class of recent modded bacterial strains that are more amenable to expressing eukaryotic proteins at the expense of some metabolic upset. Cool stuff.

EDIT 2: Additionally, someone in my lab is in the process of trying to make large amounts of a couple of novel weird fungal proteins in order to study their activity in vitro. She can't express them in a fungus (the context in which they fold normally) since they will alter the cell division cycle of the fungi and probably kill them, so she's expressing them in bacteria. Had a very hard time getting them to both fold correctly and stay stable without degradation. Over the course of more than six months she's had to rebuild the system she is using to express it several times, and the final successful version involves expressing the protein alongside a binding partner that is required to make it not aggregate into mush immediately upon translation, fused to a tag that makes it more soluble, and using slightly nonstandard extraction chemicals to keep it from denaturing. You probably need to apply a similarly tailored approach to many novel proteins when you yank them across contexts, which you can justify more readily if you stand to make money off it.

On the other hand, I also looked at a number of recent papers studying the effects of this growth factor. All the studies used daily intraperitoneal injections (injections through the abdominal wall into the space around the intestines) for about a month, of 0.1 mg per kilogram of body weight. That might just be because it can be difficult to get lots of needles into a mouse blood vessel in a short period of time though, but it still suggests that maintaining levels needs lots of injection. Also, according to Peprotech, their cheapest cost is $3900 per milligram (at their current levels of production, which is limited and for research purposes). Of course, insulin is probably a better model of a protein product that makes it big time, though not a perfect one since that prevents rather severe issues immediately rather than slowing chronic ones.

As for stuff brought up in this post, I think that it is probably should indeed possible to muck around with yeast until you can get it to process secreted proteins how you want - just taking a lot longer.

You can freeze nematodes and water bears fairly easily. Notably both of these are evolved to survive dessication and freezing in their normal life cycle and have their largest dimension on the order of one mm. Its a bit of a stretch to call what some frogs can do naturally in the outdoors 'freezing' but again, massive evolutionary pressure.

If you try to freeze a complicated structure bigger than a few cubic centimeters that isn't the ridiculously vascularized and quite small and very homogenous in terms of water content rabbit kidney, you come up with something that is so damaged by the freezing process that it falls apart physically and chemically upon unfreezing. The unfreezing part is not the limiting factor, because there just isn't a paused functional organism left behind by the freezing process.

Alex is an expert on his own life

The OP is an expert on the facts of his own life. One of the standard LW lessons is that people tend to suck at evaluating themselves, though.

Moving to a big city should also help. Currently I am living in a relatively thinly populated region of a bit less than a million people. Is there material on this, that is choosing the right city for onself? It gets ridiculous how fast choices shrink the more constraints one sets.

Yes, though it seems harder to tell whether one can get into such a position ahead of time, with less transparency.

It's easy to tell ahead of time that you can make an impact as a blogger or a startup founder or a non-profit leader? Hardly - those are all high-risk endeavors, especially in the digital domain: many smart bloggers with something great to say never reach a large audience; many even fail to a modest but interested audience.

Stability and consistency are the rewards of traditional, ordinary careers; and for many people those are excellent virtues. Make sure your clients understand this. Entrepreneurship, in particular, requires a certain degree of hubris. Society as a whole gains from that hubris, and in selected sectors and times and places the would-be entrepreneurs gain in expectation, but "How would I handle failure" should be a question that anyone embarking on such a path should sincerely ask themselves first".

What are some other categories? (I can think of others, like tech entrepreneurship, but I'm wondering if there are ones that haven't occurred to me.

Non-tech entrepreneurship. And in the domain of non-profits, locally-oriented ones. They can't impact as many people, but impact is often greater and more immediate, and your impact is more immediately visible to yourself. For some people being able to closely observe their own impact is very motivating.

In general, however, at a young age foundational skills and opening their minds are more important than any particular direction (though a particular cause/direction can be very motivating). Show people who think academics or hard sciences are the obvious path that all sorts of "soft skills" are actually very valuable even in their presumptive careers, but can also open their eyes to other paths.

Whatever they seem to have closed their mind to without proper consideration, that's what you can target for each individual.