Education
Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is working to optimize medical research priorities in the United States.
Beginning in earth sciences at Harvard, Betts-LaCroix contributed to the field of long-term regulation of oxygen on Earth over multi-100 Million-year timespans, quantifying the effect of the burial efficiency of organic carbon as a feedback mechanism. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he designed and built an autonomous, robotic system that enables research into ocean circulation patterns and climate change, by operating untended for up to one year at sea on battery power and collecting hyper-pure water samples at predetermined intervals. In work at Caltech, Betts-LaCroix moved into biophysics, publishing a paper in Science that has been cited by more than 500 subsequent scientific works.
In this work, he, along with David Beratan and Jose Onuchic proved for the first time that electron-transfer rates in proteins are determined by the electron orbital interactions in the protein structure.
This created a new category of mobile computing devices between PDAs and laptops, which were initially dubbed the "Ultra Personal Computer", and which subsequently became known as the "Netbook". After OQO, Betts-Lacroix was active in Silicon Valley as a lecturer and mentor for Chief executive officers of start up companies.
Betts-LaCroix has participated in the Quantified Self movement since the beginning, and has given numerous presentations on aspects of self experimentation and tracking, including experiments in the 28-Hour day. In 2010 he joined startup Halcyon Molecular to lead its automation efforts.
Halcyon, funded by, among others, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, attempted to sequence human deoxyribonucleic acid using electron microscopes.
The underlying goal of Halcyon"s work was to make meaningful progress in understanding human biology in order to improve medicine. Following the theme of improving medicine, Betts-LaCroix founded in 2012. The efforts of the people working in Health Extension are motivated by recognizing that
Most healthcare money treats age-related diseases;
Aging is the single biggest risk factor for these diseases;
But funding to address the biochemical processes of aging is less than 0.01% of healthcare spending—and correcting this missed opportunity to optimally assign medical research and translation priorities.