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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...
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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...
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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...
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2
May
2025

A Sublime Experience: Views of Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon Cancer Research

Kathmandu, Nepal We did it together. The Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation completed a splendid expedition to Everest Base Camp on Apr. 23, 2025. This trip succeeded on every count. All 17 members of the team made it to the mountaineering camp at 17,600 feet / 5,364 meters. We exceeded our $700,000 fundraising goal for high-risk /...
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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...
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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...
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11
Apr
2025

Why I Left European Science

Monday was my last day as a group leader at The Francis Crick Institute. I got my job at the Crick in 2020, almost exactly 5 years ago, right as COVID was beginning. I had finished my PhD in 2019, and had always told myself that I would only ever be an academic if I could find a place where...
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9
Apr
2025

What US Biotech Can Do to Meet the Moment

We have entered a new era in biotech.   Turmoil at the FDA has introduced new uncertainty. NIH funding cuts and grant delays have led to academic institutions to hold off on job offers to young scientists. The Trump Administration’s reset of trade relations with the world caused a financial market meltdown, and wild rebound. All of these things are...
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8
Apr
2025

We Need an mRNA Champion in a Red Cape

I grew up in an era of Superman comic books. Superman captivated the imagination of a generation of kids like me. It told stories of an otherwise ordinary human who could achieve extraordinary feats of speed and strength, leaping tall buildings with a single bound, to defeat the bad guys. Miracles could happen on a foundation of truth and justice,...
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7
Apr
2025

Leaving A Mark On Patients

Leading a nonprofit that helps kids and families with terrible diseases requires a certain ability to roll with the punches. That feeling hit last week when I heard about Peter Marks’ forced resignation as Director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). Here was a scientific champion of innovative cell and gene therapies at the FDA. He...
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