The Age of Scientific Wellness – by Dr. Leroy Hood & Dr. Nathan Price

We don’t usually do an author bio beyond mentioning their professional background, but in this case it’s worth mentioning that the first-listed author, Dr. Leroy Hood, is the one who invented the automated gene sequencing technology that made the Human Genome Project possible. In terms of awards, he’s won everything short of a Nobel Prize, and that’s probably less a snub and more a matter of how there isn’t a Nobel Prize for Engineering—his field is molecular biotechnology, but what he solved was an engineering problem.

In this book, the authors set out to make the case that “find it and fix it” medicine has done a respectable job of getting us where we are, but what we need now is P4 medicine:

1. Predict
2. Prevent
3. Personalize
4. Participate

The idea is that with adequate data (genomic, phenomic, and digital), we can predict the course of health sufficiently well to interrupt the process of disease at its actual (previously unseen) starting point, instead of waiting for symptoms to show up, thus preventing it proactively. The personalization is because this will not be a “one size fits all” approach, since our physiologies are different, our markers of health and disease will be somewhat too. And the participatory aspect? That’s because the only way to get enough data to do this for an entire population is with—more or less—an entire population’s involvement.

This is what happens when, for example, your fitness tracker asks if it can share anonymized health metrics for research purposes and you allow it—you are becoming part of the science (a noble and worthy act!).

You may be wondering whether this book has health advice, or is more about the big picture. And, the answer is both. It’s mostly about the big picture but it does have a lot of (data-driven!) health advice too, especially towards the end.

The style is largely narrative, talking the reader through the progresses (and setbacks) that have marked the path so far, and projecting the next part of the journey, in the hope that we can avoid being part of a generation born just too late to take advantage of this revolutionary approach to health.

Bottom line: this isn’t a very light read, but it is a worthwhile one, and it’ll surely inspire you to increase the extent to which you are proactive about your health!

Click here to check out The Age Of Scientific Wellness, and be part of it!