"I love fool's experiments. I am always making them."
- Charles Darwin, 1887

In 2009, I set out to answer a simple question in my book, Experimental Man: What one man's body reveals about his future, your health, and our toxic world - what can cutting-edge high tech tests in biomedicine tell me about myself?

In the prologue to the book I wrote:

In essence, I hope to answer two questions: how healthy am I, and what can the seemingly endless profusion of new high-tech tests for various diseases and traits tell me about my health in the present and for the future?"

This wasn't literally about me, but "me" standing in as a kind of everyman to tell a story as a journalist, and as a human guinea pig. The idea was to humanize a lot of complex science that often glazes the eyes of nonscientists - to explain through a real person the potential of an epoch of unprecedented biological discovery.

It's not just about genetics. One's DNA is just the beginning of what happens inside our bodies, and what can be tested to provide insight into ourselves. The Experimental Man Project is divided into four key areas: genetics, environment, brain and body, with body being the key component that integrates the rest into a profile of a whole person.

I have had my entire genome sequenced, hundreds of environmental toxins measured inside my body, and hundreds of scans taken of my brain and other body parts. I've had some great bio-computational minds and leading-edge companies analyze my data and attempt to predict my health future. I have worked with scientists around the world in my effort to test drive tests and write about them.

Have the results changed my life?

Yes and no. Most of the data collected remains raw and the interpretations and analysis is crude. For instance, I have had over 21,000 genetic traits identified - everything from my risk for heart attack and rare neurological disorders to whether I have blue eyes or will experience a side effect when taking a drug. Yet, most of this data has yet to be fully tested and verified for individuals like me or like you.

On this special website, Technology Review will be featuring some highlights from the Experimental Man tests, including my latest, which combines two promising technologies - stem cells and genomics - to determine if they are useful for predicting a person's future disease, and the impact of various drugs that are known to have side effects in certain people.

Read the article, check out the videos, and let us know what you would do if you had access to this technology - which is likely to happen in a few years.

For more information on the Experimental Man Project, go to http://www.experimentalman.com. And check for more blogs coming in the next few days on this site!

In Avatar, the giant blue Na'vi are animated by human actors wearing reflectors tracked by computers. This is what gave Sam Worthington's and Sigourney Weaver's avatars such lifelike grins, grimaces and frowns.

Recently, in Walnut Grove, California, I donned high-tech reflectors, too, though not as a movie star. I was being tested on a novel device that uses Hollywood tech to see if I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Beams of light are flashed to the reflectors and bounced back to sensors so sophisticated they can detect minute movements - including telltale motions associated with ADHD behavior--if, for example, I move my legs or head just 0.4 millimeters. Motions are recorded 50 times per second during a 20-minute computer test used by physicians to diagnose and measure ADHD.

The test requires a subject to tap a key on a keyboard when stars shapes appear on a screen, except when the star has four points. It's an intentionally boring exercise that nonetheless requires one to pay attention--and to stay still.

"This device provides a very good objective measurement of whether a patient has normal pattern of movement and distraction, or one associated with ADHD," says Calvin Sumner, a psychiatrist and the Chief Medical Officer of BioBehavioral Diagnostics, which makes the Avatar-like device called the Quotient ADHD System.

The Quotient system has tested 46,000 patients, and helps clinicians make what can be a difficult ADHD diagnosis for some patients. "It's become an important part of how I assess patients," says Akindele Kolade, the psychiatrist and BioBehavioral customer who would be running my test. Kolade has one of the $19,500 devices, which come with a computer, keyboard, and Avatar-getup mounted in a gray plastic cubicle.

When I took the test, I was nervous. Like many people who think they are master multitaskers, I secretly feared that my tendency (compulsion?) to simultaneously talk on the phone, scan emails, and check baseball scores is actually ADHD.

Once strapped in, I attempted to sit as still as the Buddha and got annoyed when I made a few errors. But the 20 minutes went by surprisingly fast, even though I couldn't tell you the last time I sat still doing something that boring for a full 20 minutes.

When I finished, my test was sent to the BioBehavioral head office and run through an algorithm, with the result appearing back in Kolade's office almost immediately.

"You are normal," said Kolade, to my relief.

I had strayed a few times into the "distracted" category, he said, which showed up "red" on the printed timeline of my test. But I was able to return to the "green" level of attentiveness. "People with ADHD struggle to return to attentiveness once they are distracted," said Sumnar. "We have run enough tests and collected enough data to see this pattern very clearly."

I was relieved to be designated "normal", although as I returned to my office and reengaged with iPhone, computer, and several other tasks more or less simultaneously, I wondered.

For years, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other government agencies have collected data on what Americans eat and our exposure to hundreds of chemicals in the environment. They also have tracked the prevalence of diseases such as asthma and diabetes.

Now a team at Stanford University led by physician and molecular biologist Atul Butte has found a novel way to link the two. Inventing something they call an EWAS--an environmentalwide association study--they have used statistics to find out which chemicals are associated with what disease in the CDC's sample populations. The study was published this week in the journal PLoS.

As a proof-of-concept the researchers choose investigated possible links between subjects in national surveys that test positive for type 2 diabetes and a list of 266 chemical toxins that are also tracked by the CDC through levels that show up in blood or urine.

The team found significant associations between people with diabetes and their exposure to heptachlor epoxide, a pesticide that was partially banned in 1988, and also to gamma-tocopherol, an ingredient that appears in some versions of vitamin E.

Specifically, people with detectable levels of heptachlor epoxide in their blood were more likely to have sugar levels in their blood associated with diabetes--with an odds ratio of 1.7. For the gamma-tocopherol form of vitamin E the odds ratio was 1.5. In contrast, high beta-carotene levels were slightly protective against diabetes with an odds ratio of 0.6.

"We've known for decades that environmental factors play a major role in diseases like diabetes, cancer and heart disease," said Jeremy Berg, PhD, to Science Daily. He's the director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which partially supported the research. "By enabling us to measure the impact of these factors, this new approach will shed light on how genes and the environment influence our health and could provide insights into new ways to control some of our nation's most serious health problems."

Butte and coauthors Chirag Patel and Jayanta Bhattacharya have borrowed a page from genome-wide association studies that compare populations with and without a disease or trait (cancer, blue eyes) and scan the DNA of the people in that population to ferret out genetic markers that have a high statistical correlation with that trait.

Researchers can then use statistics to determine risk factors for people who carry a genetic variation associated with the trait, providing a probability of, say, a 20 percent higher than average risk that a person will have a heart attack, or an eight-times risk that they will one day suffer from macular degeneration.

Epidemiologists and public health experts have long collected data linking or trying to link environmental exposures of toxins - everything from herbicides to dioxins and cigarette smoke - to cancer and other diseases. Nearly all of these studies, however, are reactions to known or suspected exposures in a home or workplace; to pollution emergencies; and to other specific instances where people have or may have come into contact with a specific toxin.

Other traditional studies are hypothesis-driven efforts to solve epidemiological mysteries such as why breast cancer rates are unusually high in certain regions of the country, or why autism rates are rapidly increasing.

What makes the EWAS different is that Butte's team has rather ingeniously suggested an approach that can detect associations previously unsuspected using an approach that uniformly investigates hundreds or thousands of chemicals in the environment.

This approach could help solve a conundrum that has vexed investigators for decades: how to sort through and to understand the human impact of nearly 80,000 human-produced chemicals listed by the Environmental Protection Agency--many of which show up inside of people in trace amounts that have proven difficult to test for harmful effects.

(I have been tested for over 300 chemicals inside of me, and have detectable levels of several pesticides, heavy metals, dioxins, and much more. What this means for me or for anyone else is unclear since scientists have so far been unable to test the harm - or lack of harm - of trace amounts of these chemicals inside people).

EWAS will also allow researchers to better understand the impact of thousands of dietary "chemicals" that people ingest--from vitamins and supplements to sugars.

One caution: the EWAS approach has the same downside as GWAS studies, which offer statistical correlations that need to be clinically validated in real people to see if there is a true link between a genetic marker and a risk factor for a disease, or, in this case, between a chemical in the environment and a disease. For instance, recent clinical tests for certain GWAS markers associated with heart attack were found to be less important for determining risk than other factors such as family history.

Assuming the statistical models are replicated and validated by other researchers, EWAS analyses could provide a wealth of target chemicals to clinically investigate for true linkages with disease.

"This approach catapults us from being forced to ask very simple, directed questions about environment and disease into a new realm in which we can look at many, many variables simultaneously and without bias," said Atul Butte to Science Daily. "In the future, we'll be able to analyze the effectof genes and environment together, to find, perhaps, that a specific gene increases the risk of a disease only if the person is also drinking polluted well water."