28
Nov
2025
A New Book on GLP-1’s Contested Scientific Roots and Complex Cultural Impact — Plus Further Reading
In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, I review Off the Scales, a fascinating new book by Reuters journalist Aimee Donnellan about the discovery and development of GLP-1 agonists and their impact on medicine, culture, and society. The review, aimed at a generalist audience, focuses mostly on the societal and cultural implications, but TR readers may be especially interested in the... Read More
24
Nov
2025
Recommended Podcasts (and A Few Books), 2025 Year-End Edition
It’s time for my annual feature: recommended podcasts (and a few books) for TR readers to consider. As usual, these suggestions generally steer clear of politics; they also aren’t the only podcasts I listen to, but they’re the ones I’m least likely to skip. Biotech and Health Care Of course, everyone in biotech should listen to Luke’s interview series, The... Read More
22
Nov
2025
Why Patients – And Many Innovative Doctors – Are Pursuing Health Outside the System
Our current system of delivering care is awful from the perspective of seemingly every stakeholder. It frustrates, enrages, saddens, and depletes patients and physicians alike. No one designed it this way. It evolved through a series of choices and contingencies that perhaps made sense at the time but now seem to have led us down an evolutionary dead end. While... Read More
30
Oct
2025
The Outsized Significance of A New Study of AI in Diabetes Prevention
A lifestyle intervention delivered by AI was found to be as effective as validated traditional interventions delivered by trained experts in a carefully conducted implementation study conducted by Johns Hopkins researchers and just published in JAMA. These results have broad significance and speak to the promise of AI to deliver promising behavior-change interventions at unprecedented scale. Context: The DPP The... Read More
24
Oct
2025
The Biology of Belonging: Social Connection Meets Geroscience
Digital health, fitness, and longevity platforms have focused on the constant measurement and relentless optimization of biometric parameters, an often-valuable effort but one that has systematically left behind vital components of health and flourishing – such as social connection — that are more difficult to measure. The Health Value of Social Connection Robust longitudinal studies, including the Harvard Study of... Read More
6
Oct
2025
Silicon Valley: Yes, AI Does Enhances Productivity — In The Right Hands & Context
Outside the glare of hyperbolic headlines, organizations of all sizes – including most in healthcare – are urgently trying to figure out how AI will fit into their workflows and business plans. Perhaps the most interesting recent discussion I’ve heard on this subject involved a trio of Andreessen-Horowitz (a16z) partners — Erik Torenberg, Martin Casado, and Steven Sinofsky — who were... Read More
6
Oct
2025
“Food Intelligence”: Make Healthy the Default — In Public Spaces and Private Kitchens
While “nutrition science” often seems to cry out for air quotes around “science,” we are fortunate now to have a new book on the topic written by one of the most thoughtful and deliberate nutrition researchers of the modern age: Kevin Hall. Hall has consistently steered a course of thoughtful rigor, leading a succession of highly impactful studies at the... Read More
5
Oct
2025
Consumer Health’s Digital Convergence – And What’s Still Missing
Consumers are taking increased ownership of their health. As Laura Landro recently described in the Wall Street Journal, this trend is driven in part by necessity — specifically by “a shortage of doctors, long wait times for appointments and an increasing prevalence of chronic diseases such as diabetes earlier in adulthood.” But our push to manage our own health is also motivated... Read More
11
Sep
2025
Can Biopharma Make AI Sing?
“… When I’m with her I’m confused Out of focus and bemused And I never know exactly where I am Unpredictable as weather She’s as flighty as a feather She’s a darling, she’s a demon, she’s a lamb… … How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?” The lyrics, of course, are... Read More
5
Sep
2025
Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan: Drawn to Analytics, Grounded Expectations for AI
Yesterday, the MS/MBA program at Harvard Business School (HBS) hosted Novartis CEO Dr. Vas Narasimhan for what proved to be a captivating and wide-ranging discussion, led by Dr. Christiana Bardon (Managing Partner of MPM BioImpact) and Professor Amitabh Chandra of HBS and the Harvard Kennedy School. Chandra co-leads the MS/MBA program together with the former head of Novartis’s early research... Read More
23
Aug
2025
Health on Tap
Mingling easily with the sold-out crowd of eager young professionals crowding into a Boston brewery last Thursday to hear a local historian unpack the Gilded Age, Ty and Felecia Freely laugh more and grimace less than prototypical health entrepreneurs. Yet they may be cultivating exactly the sort of engagement health tech too often overlooks — and on which flourishing and... Read More
20
Aug
2025
Seeking Pockets of Reducibility in Personalized Medicine: Lessons from Google’s AI Health Coach Study
Technologists often imagine a future of health in which AI delivers highly personalized, preemptive guidance, powered by dense, dynamic streams of data. Continuous sensors track physiology and metabolism; lab panels and -omics assays capture molecular signatures; imaging contributes structural and functional context; and genome sequencing rounds out the picture. Collected longitudinally and at population scale, these data are linked to... Read More
5
Jul
2025
Personal Health Platforms Are Evolving. Now, Their Ambition Must Deepen.
I spoke recently at one of my favorite local conferences, an inspirational gathering that brings together remarkable health leaders (plus serendipitous invitees like me) to discuss difficult topics with the exceptional candor afforded by Chatham House rules. While much of the focus was on broad health policy issues, the proceedings were enlivened by presentations from early-stage biopharma and healthcare investors... Read More
17
Jun
2025
From Optimization to Agency: Reframing the Future of Personal Health
While medical advances have afforded us the luxury of longer lives, we now spend many of our later years coping with the ravages of chronic illnesses of aging — cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s, and cancer. Many of these conditions seem linked to long-term exposure to low grade systemic inflammation, a pathological process known as “inflammaging.” ... Read More
3
Jun
2025
NEJM Study Linking Exercise, Cancer Recovery Raises Two Concerns: What If It’s Wrong? What If It’s Right?
This week featured a rare crossing of the streams, as the buttoned-down world of cancer research met the buzzy world of exercise and wellness. One result: a randomized controlled study of exercise in 889 cancer patients published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and accompanied by a torrent of enthusiastic coverage in the popular press. Another: the publication... Read More
8
May
2025
Health Deserves A Vision More Capacious Than Dashboard Metrics
Consumer health and wellness is experiencing a flurry of activity. The lab testing company Function (motto: “It’s time to own your health”) acquired Ezra, a whole body MRI company promising “the world’s most advanced longevity scan.” Oura, maker of the popular smart ring, recently added an integration for continuous glucose measurement as well as the ability to calculate meal... Read More
4
May
2025
Tech-Enabled Power To The People: Ingratiating Chatbots and a Virtuous Food App
For at least a decade, nearly every tech company has promoted their product as facilitating the “democratization” of something – perhaps “data driven medicine,” or “genetic information” or “access to clinical trials” or “digital health” (all real examples). Like “mission-driven,” “results-oriented,” and “disruptive,” the term “democratization” has become so overused by the tech community that it’s now more of an... Read More
3
May
2025
Our Collective Hope For AI in Health, Plus Explanatory Models and an Epic Podcast
A recent piece by Nathan Price captures our collective hope for AI in health with unusual clarity, even as there remains impassioned disagreement regarding how close these ambitions are to meaningful realization. For context, Price is Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Human Healthspan at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and CSO of Thorne, a company best... Read More
22
Apr
2025
Embracing Non-Linear Career Paths: Professor Martin Gaynor
(Guest) Editor Note: Martin Gaynor, the Lester A. Hamburg University Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, was recently honored with the Victor R. Fuchs Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Health Economics by the American Society of Health Economists. His response (shared with his permission) was both striking and magnificent, emphasizing the contingency of... Read More
14
Apr
2025
Can You Improve Your Health Without Obsessing About It?
Can you improve your health without obsessing about it? I’ve been, well, obsessing about this question as I continue to spend more time and mindshare in the world of healthy aging evangelists, enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs, longevity champions keen to guide you, and often test you, towards their conceptions of healthier aging. (See this piece on the longevity boom, and this... Read More