A free event - attend in-person, or via Zoom remotely:
Conversation with Lee Hood, MD, PhD
You’re invited to the Buck’s Levy Community Seminar,
supported by a generous gift from
William and Elisabeth Levy.
Thursday, February 15, 2024
10 a.m. — Doors Open (light refreshments available)
11 a.m. – 12 p.m. Presentation and Discussion
The future of medicine (including how we age) will be personalized, predictive, data-rich and for the most part, in our own hands. Join Lee Hood, the Buck’s new Chief Innovation Officer and Distinguished Professor, and learn how our new Center for Phenomic Health will transform healthcare by enabling a deep, holistic understanding of individual health leading to precision healthcare that can catch the onset of disease years before symptoms arise. Revolutionizing prevention is the new frontier of medicine, and we are thrilled that it is happening at the Buck.
This event has limited seating and will fill up quickly so register now! You may register for up to two in-person tickets or one zoom ticket if you would prefer to join us remotely.
If you cannot attend but would like to support the incredible work happening at the Buck click here.
Register now
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Thanks. I signed up. Professor Hood is amazing. I’ve heard he and Dr Price speak several times about The Age of Scientific Wellness…it’s the future of health preservation.
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The recording of the meeting
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Thanks! I missed the presentation so this is very helpful.
For anyone wanting to hear from Nathan Price PhD, a collaborator of Dr Lee Hood, here is my interview that I recorded in January 2024. Dr Price is now with Thorne working to bring some of the Scientific Wellness ideas to life and make them avail to us all. In the interview he also shares his thoughts on what we can do right now to be healthier.
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Another presentation by Lee Hood:
Note: He mentions he does 190 pushups in the morning in 3 sets…
related website he mentions:
Some slides:
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Extremely depressing. It’s time to admit the emperor is wearing no clothes. A great river of words, all coming down to this brute fact: it’s just trying to position your body (brain) to hang on to what’s there to begin with. It’s like you get an inheritance and your only option is to try to devise all the (devilishly creative?!) ways in which you can spend it as slowly as possible - cut costs, cut overhead, find savings, economize, penny pinch and starve. But as any wealth creator knows, you cannot save your way to wealth - you must generate income. Just trying to sit on a steadily diminishing pile without additional income is a way to end up broke, slow or fast.
What is needed is exogenous intervention to fundamentally alter the limitations of your genome. You can’t healthy diet exercise socialize your way to radical time extension on your expiration date. You need some kind of pharmacological full bore frontal assault on all systems to move the needle until genetic engineering can blow past our biological limits. That ain’t happening with the help of a bowl of oats, a brisk walk and a circle of friends. No pushup is going to push me beyond my pushout date - give me something real.
We can watch any number of presentations iterating the same handful of time worn nostrums, until they all blend into a uniform sludge of gray hoplessness. Repetition is walking in circles with no forward progress.
I’m waiting. I’m waiting. I’m waiting for that one slide - the one full of formulas of game changing drugs that will rocket us beyond the circle jerk of wellness cliches. Until then, it’s just the same endless fiddling at the margins that doesn’t even get us to what blind genetic luck got Vincent Dransfield to 110, bless his heart.
Waiting for Godot. Spoiler alert: Godot never arrives.
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I think for many people, the game is waiting around until we do discover that one thing. And these sorts of huge data gathering studies are useful for finding what the key signal might be. Rapamycin/mTor is clearly important, but it’s not enough by itself. If you subscribe to the belief that we have inbuilt programmed aging, then it’s possible to target it, and possibly reverse it. If you believe that it’s the result of accumulated damage, then we need to understand how that damage happens so that it can be prevented, and potentially reversed.
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Too pessimistic I think. The longevity drugs and treatments will always, ultimately, be complimented with traditional disease therapies because no mater how good the longevity drugs and treatments are (in any reasonable foreseeable future) we will all get disease at some point - so I think Lee Hood’s approach is still extremely valuable in that approach; identifying via proteomics, “multi-omics” and other measures, as early as possible so as to allow you to resolve these disease pathways as quickly and early as possible.
We’ll likely always need both approaches…
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Yes, well I imagine that if we are taking a radical approach to life extension, then fixing disease predisposition is going to be a routine subset of bigger interventions. Same as the attempts to deal with high cholesterol through inserting PCSK9i like expression directly into the genome (I think they did that in New Zealand?). You are born, or you are an adult, and they run a full scan of your genome. They flag all disease vulnerabilities and fix them right there by re-coding, but that’s just a subset of the real engineering - inserting sequences which extend the whole lifespan in the same way as nature has done for the naked molerat - it’s a rodent that by size and family tree should live about as long as a mouse, i.e. 3 years or so; instead the ugly little bugger hangs around for 30, for a honking 10x extension. Translate that to humans and a 10x gets us 800-1000 years… I’ll take it! Oh, and regarding disease - that lifespan is pretty disease free, because it comes with the territory - you can’t live that long if your organism is prone to disease… we can only envy the NMR virtual cancer free physiology and remarkable resilience against toxins and pathogens. So it’s a distinction with little difference, seems to me. YMMV.
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How should we make peace with the fact that we will die (and possibly end all existence; no afterlife)?
Start with the condition under which you would feel fully satisfied that you had used your time to live a full, meaningful existence?
What can you do between now and the end to get close to that condition?
I think it would be wrong to dodge the fact that we are human. We are not just the rationale, logical aspects of our thinking selves. We are the whole human package of emotion and feeling and instinctive desires.
The extreme of spending 100% of our efforts to add a few years at the cost of accomplishing nothing else seems like a poor choice. The other extreme of doing nothing to live longer (eg, unroped rock climbing for the pure thrill) also seems like a poor choice.
Saying that the answer is individual is a copout. There is a way of thinking about this question that is fundamentally human. The answer may be individual, but the problem is not. Perhaps there are multiple ways to consider and solve the problem. Thinking and feeling this out is the big question. The rest is rearranging the deck chairs in the Titanic.
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We still don’t know how long naked mole rats live. We’ve guessed 30, but there were mole rats that made it to 40. Nobody knew until they kept count. I also wonder if Joe, the 40+ year old mole rat is still alive?
The head researcher in charge of Joe said mole rats don’t die of old age. They get killed off by other rats looking to take their place.
Just like lobsters don’t die of old age, they die of exhaustion from having to grow larger shells as they get older.
We need to figure out what is causing us to age and then flip that switch so we don’t anymore. Unfortunately, evolution built it into our systems too well…
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