You can donate cord blood for free to a public bank. Obviously you're not guaranteed that it won't be used by someone else before a sibling potentially needs it, but the chances of it being useful to your own family are almost zero anyway -- not exactly zero, but if you were making a list of the ways to best increase your life expectancy given $5k to spend, I doubt it would even make the top 1,000 options in terms of expected ROI.
I would actually argue that the chances of using it are actually much higher & it would make the top 1000 options in terms of expected ROI. Using type 1 diabetes as an example:
By age 18, approximately 1/300 people in the US develop type 1 diabetes
and that's just for diabetes. Consider the chances and corresponding research around cerebral palsy, hair loss, heart failure, liver disease, cancers, and more that stem cells - and specifically cord blood stem cells - have been successfully used for.
There was some research that indicated stem cells can be made from skin cells. Is there a chance this field will eventually catch up by the time stem cell therapies become more widely accesssible?
I don't think of "exercise" as a "5k" investment. Sure you could buy 5k worth of equipment, but how much more does that improve your health over calisthenics and a set of dumbbells?
Yes, education I'd say is in the top 10 or 50. But how can you possibly fill out the top 1000 without including umbilical cord stem cells?
