A new competition, launched by neuroscientist Christin Glorioso, will pit hundreds of people against each other in a race to lower their biological age. Over six months, roughly 500 participants will track changes in biological age using a variety of tests, including epigenetic blood-spot analysis, brain-age assessments, and facial-age selfies. The goal, according to Glorioso, is to “explain to the world what aging clocks are” and to build the world’s most comprehensive clock dataset. Entry costs range from $999 for standard competitors to $4,499 for “ultra” participants, who receive additional scans and blood tests. The event officially begins in January, though some participants have already started and logged baseline measurements on a public leaderboard.
The contest reflects a growing but still contested field. Aging clocks—tools that estimate biological age from DNA methylation, proteins, or other markers—are useful for studying aging in populations, but they are not yet precise enough to reliably measure an individual’s biological age. The article notes that researchers do not fully understand what each clock captures, and results can vary widely. For example, one early competitor in the contest, a 47-year-old woman, was given a biological age of 68.1, driven partly by a chair-stand test that scored her at 100. Glorioso hopes the contest will also gather data on low-risk interventions like red-light masks and sauna use, which partner companies want to test without running full clinical trials. The source is a single first-person article from MIT Technology Review, so no independent verification or contrasting viewpoints are provided.