When I was a Ph.D. campaigner astatine Caltech successful the 1960s, my advisor told maine that I should ever signifier biology astatine the starring edge—it’s much amusive there. He besides told maine that if you privation to fundamentally alteration the mode a discipline, specified arsenic medicine, is practiced, invent a caller technology.
Technology was the absorption of my involvement successful quality complexity. It occurred to maine that medicine astatine the clip was similar the unsighted radical and the elephant. Each was feeling a antithetic portion of the carnal and declaring it was a spear, oregon a fan, oregon a stump. That was an particularly apt analogy for medicine astatine the time, due to the fact that the unsighted radical were each feeling the outside of the elephant.
I was convinced that we needed much tools to plumb the complexity of the quality body. We needed a mode to look wrong the elephant. Blood, I realized, is simply a model into wellness and illness due to the fact that it bathes each organs, which merchandise their telltale molecules. If you could work these molecules, you could infer the authorities of the interior organs.
Another important instrumentality is large data. We needed to make an tremendous magnitude of data, not lone astir our genes, but besides our phenomes. In different words, we needed to analyse the analyzable interactions betwixt the idiosyncratic and the environment, and however these interactions impact our health.
Years later, aft my colleagues and I invented DNA sequencers and different technologies aimed astatine peering wrong the elephant, we realized that we needed to usage these tools for the intent of keeping radical well. The aboriginal of wellness attraction laic successful our quality to foretell the onset of disease, forestall it from happening, and doing this successful a mode that was personalized to the individual. In caller years we person gotten beauteous bully astatine the 3 Ps—predicting, preventing and personalizing—but we request to adhd a fourth: participation. We request to usage the champion tools of behavioral science to prosecute radical successful being progressive participants successful maintaining their ain health.
This communicative is the improvement of what we’re present calling technological wellness.
We present person the tools and the know-how to summation the fig of steadfast years a idiosyncratic tin expect to live. We cognize however to amended the prime of people’s lives, be to an aging colonisation and grip a dependable emergence successful chronic disease. We tin bash these things for little wealth than we present walk connected an outdated paradigm of medicine—treating unwellness alternatively than preventing it successful the archetypal place. And we tin usage these tools to manner a much equitable and compassionate strategy of wellness attraction that helps galore of the slightest fortunate radical among america who are presently near out.
Changing large institutions is ne'er easy—and that is particularly existent for the multi-trillion-dollar aesculapian industry. Making this imaginativeness of good attraction a world volition necessitate a extremist alteration successful however we deliberation astir wellness care.
In the meantime, a caller procreation of scientists and engineers are gathering the tools.
Leroy Hood is CEO of Phenome Health, a nonprofit devoted to technological wellness. He is besides co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology and has been progressive successful the founding of 15 biotechnology companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Arivale and Nanostring.
Find retired much astir Phenome Health’s efforts to alteration the aboriginal of wellness care here. Learn much astir phenomics, the caller subject of wellness, successful different stories successful this special report.
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