Hi, I’m Aastha and thanks for joining Live Longer World as I interview frontier longevity scientists and parse through the snake-oil in longevity. On my health stack, you can see my exact collection of non-toxic health products I use (9 categories including sleep, fitness, clean water, lighting, air quality, non-toxic kitchen).
For decades, biology thought that our genes would predict disease and health outcomes. And that the ability to alter our genes or create genetic-based medicine would be the end to all diseases. The Human Genome Project began in 1990 and was declared complete in 2003, with exactly this dream in mind. The idea was that if we are able to sequence the entire genome, we will be able to map genetic defects to diseases, and find the cure to all diseases. As Denis Noble puts it:
“The promise was that by 2010, ten years later, if you had a cancer, you would go to your GP, show him your DNA sequence, and he would prescribe you the right medication.”
This dream hasn’t held up.
Denis Noble, one of the foremost figures in systems biology, has been arguing that we have wasted the last 70 years in biology chasing this genetic dream. He says our health does not reside in our genes. He is the author of several popular science books including The Music of Life and Dance to the Tune of Life, that have altered the perspective of many in the field, including mine.
Denis says that instead of being myopically focused on genes, we should study functional networks in biology. If we have the wrong theories and conceptual frameworks around disease, developing treatments is going to always lead to dead-ends.
I recently released a podcast with Denis Noble, going in depth into all of this. This post is a companion to the episode, covering practical and bonus takeaways.
This was my 2nd time interviewing Denis Noble, and the first was in conjunction with Michael Levin.
In This Bonus Takeaways I Cover:
Why your genes are a CD and not the CD player
Why genes (polygenic risk scores) fail to predict who gets cancer, heart disease, or Alzheimer’s
Why gene therapy applies to roughly 4% of disease, and why it is not the solution for most chronic diseases
How your behavior and environment may be passed to your children without any change to your DNA
Why Denis Noble says your mother’s egg cell carries as much information as your entire genome
Why chasing a single optimal biomarker misunderstands how the body works
What our cells are doing to repair our DNA right now
Why a cancer behaves like an organism growing inside us
The heart drug that exists today because a team stopped looking for genes
These podcast conversations are dense with insight. In these bonus takeaways, I pull out the most important ideas from each episode, explain the science in plain language, and turn it into clear, practical steps you can use right away. 10 minutes with one of these will leave you smarter about how your body works, and with something you can change about your health starting today.
