Preston Estep

In March 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Estep founded the non-profit, open-source Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC), serving as Chief Science Officer. RaDVaC was founded as a self-experimentation-based, collaborative, distributed research initiative. The chitosan and peptide intranasal vaccine relies on decades of previous animal and human subject research. Estep first tested the initial vaccine on himself, and was joined by his colleagues at RaDVaC for subsequent generations of the vaccine, among which was his mentor at Harvard, George M. Church. RaDVaC makes the detailed rationale and instructions for its vaccine formulations available in a versioned white paper.

Estep is the author of the 2016 book The Mindspan Diet, which proposes a concept called "mindspan" (a measure of overall health and mental longevity). Estep suggests that mindspan is superior to lifespan and other measures of health and longevity because a key parameter of mindspan is good mental function throughout life. The Mindspan Diet presents a contrast between the longest lived people with high mental function ("the Mindspan Elite") and a second group of people from throughout the world who have good healthcare but shorter lives and the highest levels of cognitive decline ("the Mindspan Risk").

He has been highly critical of strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS), a plan to reverse and repair the damage of aging. In mid-2006 he was the lead author of a submission by a group of nine scientists to the MIT Technology Review SENS Challenge. The SENS Challenge panel of judges selected this submission as the best but concluded that it failed to meet the burden of proof established by the challenge: to show that "SENS is not worthy of learned debate." Some commentators have been critical of this requirement, saying that virtually any idea is worthy of some level of learned debate, though the terms of the prize were known in advance to all participants. Estep and colleagues failed to win the $20,000 prize on offer, but Technology Review's editor, Jason Pontin, nevertheless awarded them $10,000 for their "careful scholarship". (See the "De Grey Technology Review controversy" entry for more details.) Their submission criticized the SENS plan as essentially bringing Lysenkoism to modern aging research. Estep and colleagues donated the $10,000 award to the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR).