Description: The gap between diagnosis and treatment.

Question: Is there a gap between diagnosis and treatment?

Transcript: Well there’s two gaps there. One is a gap between our ability to diagnose and cure, and there’s other cases where they have the ability to cure but not diagnose the small set of people who react very negatively. Both of these, I think, are going to see major progress. They’ve already seen some major progress. But for example, different people have different responses to a personal decision. If you are offered the ability to get diagnosed for a disease for which there is no cure, some people say, “I don’t want to know that”. Other people say, “I want to know that, but I’m not going to do anything about it.” And the third set say, “Oh we’re gonna embrace this. We’re going to become experts on this disease,” even though they’re not even scientists. They become experts. Think of Lorenzo’s Oil where Augusto Odone actually starts to learn biochemistry and himself makes a contribution to lipid disorders . . . makes a new drug-like, food-like molecule. But there are many cases of this where people become the poster . . . . their family will become poster children for the disease: Michael J. Fox for Parkinson’s, and Doug Melton for Diabetes, and Betty Ford for cancer and substance abuse, and so forth. So I think that’s a really big opportunity is to take ownership of all the things that are special about your family, both positive and negative, and link up with other families that have the same alleles, the same changes in their DNA, the same variations that make them different from the average, and see how it plays out differently in different families. Maybe that some of them have much more severe traits than others, and you can find it by sharing that information. And you can see what lifestyle changes might be correlated with a less severe outcome. So I think that embracing things that don’t have cures, whether they’re severe or not, is an opportunity that we’ll see more and more.

Question: What is your vision of the future?

Transcript: Well I think that certainly in the . . . I would say in the short term, but since these are exponential technologies, it’s actually a very long time, in say, Internet time, okay? I think that most people will get access to their genetic information. A lot of people will want it and they will get it. It will probably be affordable this year. So it’s not very long even in Internet time. But then to get it interpreted they will have to share. I don’t know exactly how it will work out, but I see trends for sharing. You know, Wikapedia, the Red Cross, all kinds of things old and new that indicate that at least a significant fraction of the population will share their genes, their environment, and their traits. That will lead us to a point where . . . And I also see stem cells where you can take a bit of skin and reprogram it so then you can get access to any tissue in your body. That’s coming down just in a few years. Then using that to fix what’s going on in adult aging so you actually stay youthful for a longer period of time. Not necessarily eliminating aging, but certainly increasing the quality of life. I think that will happen, and that it will have a huge impact because there’s a certain wisdom that will happen when healthy people stay healthy and engaged for a long period of time. Another one of the things that make humans fairly amazing is that they do live for a long time, well past what would have been their reproductive limit in ancient days, because grandparents, and great grandparents, and business leaders and so forth add value that goes beyond their reproductive years. And I think that if we can make those very healthy and very undistracted by health issues, that would be a huge change in the future. And then if we have computers, robots, humans, all acting as super computers and geniuses, we have a planet full of six billion people, each with six billion super computers, then you can no longer predict. I mean that’s a fairly rosy picture, but that at point you don’t know where it goes.

Recorded on: 7/6/2007 at The Aspen Ideas Festival