Chapter 9
It’s in Your Genes? — 6
Medical researchers face unnecessary delays in getting protocols approved and fulfilling enrollment targets, which adds up to great expense. There has been much effort to foster open science and broad collaboration, but we still have far to go. Generative AI firms protect their most important and valuable models, which is understandable, but this is a serious obstacle to health care developments.
We saw how Operation Warp Speed, with a nominal investment of $12 billion in 2020, markedly accelerated the mass production and validation of COVID vaccines within ten months from the time the SARS-CoV-2 virus genome was first genetically sequenced. That investment was small compared with the increase of morbidity and loss of lives that would have occurred were highly effective vaccines not rapidly available. This was unprecedented in two ways: first, how fast a vaccine was produced and shown to be highly effective, which on average takes eight to ten years; and second, that the government invested to such an extent in a public-private industry partnership. Surely expanding the human health span is as worthwhile as halting the growth of one killer virus?
Compelling proof from medical research is difficult to come by without substantial dedicated funding. That validation is essential for acceptance in the medical community—doctors themselves must trust the evidence and be willing to change medical practice. Historically, the medical community has been resistant to change, especially when it involves ceding more responsibility to patients. The resistance to change is amplified by the need for regulatory approvals and the challenge of coming up with new reimbursement paths. These barriers add up to years lost in contradistinction to the number of years of health span that we could gain.
We have preliminary data to get us to some of the most far-reaching objectives of preventing serious age-related diseases. You may have felt, like I have, that you were dealt “bad genes” from your parents. For me, it was a father who went blind from autoimmune diabetes by age forty-nine and a mother who died of cancer in her early fifties. How can we be optimistic with such family histories? We now have more accurate ways to assess a person’s risk for nearly all the major, common diseases, and these assessments will keep getting better. So too will our ability to prevent a dreaded condition from ever showing up or squashing it once it does. With the confluence of so many extraordinary biomedical and tech advances at once we are poised to move the needle and extract many more high-quality, healthy life years. To transform health span as we know it. I’m eager to share with you my excitement, along with notes of concern, for how we’ll augment the second half of our lives and come to be counted among the Wellderly. Soon, there will be many more people like Mrs. L. R. and Mr. R. P.