The World's 'Most Measured Man' Stanford scientist on the future of Genomics and Wearables

Medicine's most measured man.

Measuring people while they're healthy and then taking corrective action while they're healthy. It's empowering. Yeah. Almost impossible to cure a disease when it's very late stage.

Especially when the diagnosis and treatment are so broadly applied to everyone.

From this group of 109 people, 49 had a major health discovery. So having that information is very valuable. And I think the deep data dives like it's done here is very, very powerful because it really does give many more pieces of the puzzle what your health looks like and how it's shifting. I figured out my Lyme disease from a smartwatch because my heart rate jumped up and my blood oxygen dropped. Well, there's 12% of the U.S. population is diabetic. 20% don't know it. And 40% are pre-diabetic. Physicians were mad at me. I even had one yell at me and said, you should not be doing this. You are going to make everybody in the hypochondriac unit cost millions of dollars. This is not right. We did it anyway. I think the baseline is very, very important. Contract people's trajectory and then, again, optimize them. In some cases, it turned out to be life-saving. One person had a heart defect. We picked that up from his genome sequence.

If I had $1,000 to spend on tracking, managing my health, what would you spend it on?

Number ones.

Welcome Mike. It's such a pleasure to have you. I want to start by referencing the fact that if someone Googles your name, it comes up with a statement, medicine's most measured man. And I know this because I just did it. Can you explain how that has come about?

Sure. Well, we've done big data research for a long time now, initially studying biological problems. And then 17 years ago, I moved to Stanford and wanted to move into health care. And very quickly, you realize that our health care system is broken. We practice sick care rather than health care, meaning we keep people alive rather than healthy. And as a consequence, people live the last decade of their life with chronic diseases, usually pretty unhealthy. And so we were thinking about it. So we need to apply these big data issues to medicine. But then even looking at more, when you think about how we practice health care, that's also broken. You typically go to a physician's office, always in an inconvenient time. When you're there, they don't make very many measurements. That's where the big data comes in. They, you know, the whole process is very antiquated and it's very low tech. And so we wanted to change all that. And so basically, when I moved to Sanford, we set up this idea of doing deep data profiling. And I was a guinea pig. I thought we should do it on me first just to see what it takes to get all this going and get the technology up and running. Genome sequencing had just come out then. It was all brand new. And we had methods for analyzing literally tens of thousands, if not more, molecules out of blood and urine and even blood. poop, the

microbiome.

So we basically did just that. We started essentially collecting blood, urine, and stool initially from me and then later from a small group of people, about 109. And we would then measure as many molecules as possible,