Reverse Brain Aging: Tools and Techniques You Need to Know with Dr. Leroy Hood

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Farmacy.

Dr. Leroy Hood
I'll tell you the most famous of all the users of brain HQ is, Tom Brady, who in his later years used Brain HU 1 to increase his reaction time and 2 to increases depth of field, and it worked magnificently.

Mark Hyman
Now before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do the scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand. Well, you, if you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Doctor. And if you're looking for curated trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, doctor hyman.com for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

Welcome to doctor's pharmacy. I'm doctor Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy. We're gonna have a place for conversations that matter. And if you're interested in the future of medicine, the future of health, the future of wellness, and the age of scientific wellness, you're gonna love this conversation with a legend in science Doctor Leroy Hood.

He's the CEO and founder of phenome Health, which we'll talk about a nonprofit organization developing a project called the human phenome initiative. That essentially tracks all of your biomarkers and all your data. It's based on not the science of disease, but the science of wellness, and that will sequence the genes and generate The longitudinal phenoms of 1, 000, 000 people over 10 years. This is really critical. We need to track our data and find out what's going on.

Fino Health is well positioned to deliver a new paradigm in health care based on prediction prevention, personalization, and participation and it's intended to address several health care challenges. It's addressing significantly improved health outcomes. It facilitates brain health and increase cost effectiveness, reduces the chronic disease burden, and promotes healthy aging, and also enhances the US leadership and medical innovation. Now he's founded 17 biotech companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Rosetta, Aravail. He's won so many including Lascar Prize, which is kinda like a Nobel Prize in Science, the Kyoto Prize, the National Medal of Science.

He's currently chief strategy officer and professor at the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle. He's 85 years old and does a 100 push ups a day, or maybe 150. I think he said And he talks about really critical things that we're gonna discuss today, including 7 paradigm shifts driving 21st century medicine, including bringing engineering to biology, human genome project, system biology, 21st century medicine, scientific wellness, and lots more. So gonna get into all these topics. We're gonna talk about the role of tracking your biomarkers as a critical step in understanding what's happening underneath the hood understanding how we define scientific wellness and what we can do to actually help us live long and healthy lives.

So let's dive deep into this conversation with Doctor Leroy Hood. Alright. So, Lee, welcome, to The Doctor's Farmacy podcast. It's great to have you back on.

Dr. Leroy Hood
It's a pleasure to be here as always.

Mark Hyman
So, you know, as we heard from the introduction, Doctor Hood is an iconic guy in the history of medicine. And he's literally like the forest gump of scientific discoveries of the last 50 years, and he's been there at the beginning of everything. Including the beginning of bioengineering and understanding how to use technology to sequence DNA and peptides He was there at the beginning of the human genome project conception. He's developed the whole field of cross disciplinary biology, which allows us to crossover fields and understand biology in a much more complex way. He's sort of the father assist his biology and 21st century medicine and his whole new concept scientific wellness.

And so he's really kind of been at the intersection of much of what's happened in the last, 50, 60 years in medicine that hasn't quite reached the bedside yet, but we'll very soon, and we're gonna talk about what that's gonna look like and where medicine is going. Right now, you know, we can't really imagine what's coming in 5 or 10 years just as in, you know, 2005. Nobody could imagine a smartphone or basically just all the social media we have today or the technology we have and virtual reality and AI was sort of just this vague concept, but it now it's part of every everyday life. And I think this soon will be part of our everyday life, and medicine will be radically transformed, and and Doctor Hood has also sort of developed this incredible new project at the young age of 85. Called phenome health, which we're gonna talk about.

And phenome health is essentially a way to map out every conceivable aspect of your biology and to through computational biology and AI and machine learning make sense at all and find out how to understand what's going on really at the core of your biology, all the intersecting complexity that makes you you and how you're unique and how you need to personalize your own health journey and disease repair journey, it's gonna radically change everything we know. So Lee, I'm just excited to have you here because, you know, you you you've basically been there in the beginning. III read AAA textbook chapter you wrote talking about the 7 paradigm shifts that are driving 21st century medicine. So I wonder if you could kind of quickly take us through what those are. I sort of alluded to it a little bit and where you've been in them, but I think it's sort of all leading to this moment we have right now, which is a moment of of of radical re imagination of the science of medicine, which will lead us to a re imagination of the practice of medicine, and we're gonna talk about what that looks like.

So if you take us through a little bit of that that amazing history that you've been through personally and you actually led?

Dr. Leroy Hood
It's a pleasure. When I went to Caltech in 1970 as an assistant professor, I was interested in biology and and somewhat overwhelmed with its enormous complexity and that led me to thinking about things that led to success of series of paradigm changes. And I think at that time there were 3 things that I realized were important. 1, humans are complex, and the only way we're gonna solve the problems of complexity is with big data. We have to be able to de cipher it in order to understand the causal events that lead to wellness or disease and so forth.

Number 2 is really important to realize the blood is a wonderful window unto health and disease. Molecules from all organs are secreted into the blood, and if you can read those molecules out, you can assess the complexity of the whole organism from the blood itself. And the third thing was, look, this is an enormous amount of data. How in the world can we possibly handle it? And that was the beginning of systems biology.

The ideal that you the idea you need global comprehensive dynamical sets of data to be able to translate data, digital data into biological networks that underpin physiology and disease that is wellness, and and disease. And it was with this start then in the first paradigm changed my lab over the years developed 6 instruments for reading and writing DNA. And most important, of course, was the automated DNA sequencer which made possible the 2nd paradigm change, which was the human genome project. And that was interesting because 12 of us were invited to Santa Cruz in 1985 to pass judgment on the human genome project And the 2 major conclusions we reached are 1, it would be technically possible though challenging. And 2, we were split 6 to 6 on whether it was a good idea.

Those against said this is big biology, It'll take money from little science. We can't have this happening. And it took 5 years to convince the world that the genome project should be done. The 3rd paradigm change, you'd actually mentioned, and that was the idea in order to create all these instruments, I had to get engineers and mathematicians and scientists and computer scientists, and and all. And it seemed to me the most logical way to do that wasn't in 1 big lab like mine, but rather to create a new department that was cross disciplinary.

And biology at Caltech absolutely vetoed that idea. So Bill Gates made it possible to go to the University of Washington and Abbott Shaw that a anyway. And I'll say we created a department that was enormously successful called Molecular Biotechnology and it pioneered major instruments in genomics and cell biology and biochemist and so forth. And and computational methods, the 2 major computational techniques of the genome project came out of of that, lab. But but what I came to realize was the bureaucracy of a big state school made it virtually impossible to do innovative new things, and my policy has always been if you have a really new idea, you can't do it out of an old bureaucracy.

So I started the Institute for Systems Biology and that really over the last 20 some years has successfully pioneered the whole vision of systems biology and applied it both to wellness and disease. And of course, the the final paradigm change had to do with the realization and 2014 that we ought to apply this big data to individual human beings in populations. And from that began to deduce their health status and how to optimize that health status And that worked in a project of 108 individuals in 2014. We started a company called Aravail, 2000 of 15 to 19 that collected 5000 individuals and their genome and phenome data. And from that have come almost 30 different papers in major journals each giving us an idea about a story of wellness and or of prevention and how we can go about absolutely leading to the final paradigm change, which is the idea we're going to replace a disease oriented health care system with 1 that focuses on wellness and prevention.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. This is really profound. I mean, You know, when I think about human biology, and I I remember, you know, reading this book ciliance by E. O. Wilson, where he talked about the fact that we have no theory of medicine, that it's just a descriptive reactive sort of practice.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Exactly.

Mark Hyman
Really doesn't represent the underlying biology. And so we kinda navigate illness in a very clumsy way from the chronic disease perspective. I mean, what we had in early 20th century medicine was a wonderful approach to infectious disease to sanitation. To public health and enormous advances in our lifespan and and quality of health and vitamin deficiencies and all that was wonderful. And then we sort of seem to think that that same approach would work for chronic disease, and it just doesn't.

And it

Dr. Leroy Hood
doesn't get all. Yeah.

Mark Hyman
It doesn't at all. And, you know, we're we're doing spending more and more and getting less and less. And we're we're it's a frightening trajectory when we look at the fact that, you know, 34% of the population. A third more than a third of the population will be over 65 by 2050 with now 6 and 10 Americans having chronic disease and be over 65, it's more than that. So it's it's kind of a terrifying trajectory.

If we don't think differently about the problem, and and what you've done is really created a model of how we think differently about the nature of health and nature of disease. And in fact coined this term scientific wellness, which kind of upends our whole approach in medicine from 1 focused on diseases to 1 focused on the science of wellness or health. How do we define it? How do we measure it? How do we track it?

How do we modify it? How do we understand the diseases just boom happen 1 day to the next? It's actually continuum. From optimal illness all the way to some slight perturbations in our biochemistry and our biology to full blown disease. And Now when you think about, you know, your iPhone, it's an incredibly, complicated system, but it's it's not as complex as the human body.

I think of it. Maybe it's like an etch a sketch when you think about how it compares to the complexity of the body, which is chemistry biology, physics. And literally, I don't know if I got this number right, but it's I think last I read about it, it was 37, 000, 000, 000, 000 chemical reactions every second in the body. Which which is something beyond any capacity of any human to understand or think about. And so what what you really mapped out and what you're now doing using the integration of what we call deep phenotyping, which is collecting all the data you can on somebody.

You know, their blood work, their quantified self biosensor metrics. They're they're genomics. They're metabolomics. They're microbiomics. All of it.

Literally, everything you would think about and scooping it up and looking at the data in a way that is informed by knowledge, informed by a framework of thinking, but also sees patterns and relationships and creates predictive models for things that we couldn't even imagine before. So it's it's it's such an ex it's such an exciting moment and and yet we're basically my daughter's in 30 year medical school right now, and it's it's it's frustrating for me that that she's learning what she's learning I talked to her about the stuff. She's like, I don't know what you're talking about. Dad, I'm learning about diseases and rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes and cancer and you know, dementia, but not really understanding what's really happening. So can you talk about, you know, what what is actually going to be this process of transitioning from a disease care system to a true health care system.

To measuring health, how do we even think about measuring it? Because we're seeing all these revolutions happening, right, on the Omix Revolution and the ability to understand all these different data points that are tracked through our wearables or glucose monitors and using systems medicine, which is sort of the extension of systems biology,

Dr. Leroy Hood
Right. Right.

Mark Hyman
Using AI and ML to actually make sense of of all this and and how how is this going to change the medical industry and and why why are these things so essential to a wellness centered future?

Dr. Leroy Hood
So I would make a couple of points. 1, if you really want to assess and optimize wellness, you need metrics for wellness. And what is absolutely fascinating is 3 different metrics have emerged for wellness out of the aerovel population, that we've analyzed. And the first metric is a metric called your occological age, it's c h, your body says you are, as opposed to what your birthday says you are. So the further you are away below your crown launching age, the more effectively you're aging.

And what we demonstrated for Aravail is for every year a woman stayed in Aravail, she lost 1.8 years of biologic age. For every year a man stayed in, he lost 0.8 years. And I had a good friend who went through the air fail program, and lost 10 years of biological age. Now there's been a long that

Mark Hyman
could be 5 years old.

Dr. Leroy Hood
5 years old. Exactly. But the converse was also true. We looked at 40 some diseases in this population, and virtually for everyone your biological age was above your chronological age. When you came back to normal, it reduced down.

And so Here is a metric for wellness that is going to allow us to assess wellness and how effective you're aging.

Mark Hyman
What did you use there? Was it was it was it, DNA methylation, or was it some other calculation?

Dr. Leroy Hood
No. These were analytes from the blood, and we showed you could do it with protein you could do it with was doing having an algorithm with metabolites because that gave you clues both as to how your different major organs were aging, your liver, your kidney, your immune system, and so forth and it gave you hints as to what you could do to optimize the aging process. So that's 1 metric. A second metric,

Mark Hyman
which we just Is that something is that something that some people can get? Is that is that a metric or you just need

Dr. Leroy Hood
to It is a metric you can get actually, we license this metric to Thorne. And I think for $89, you can get your biological age done and it gives you at the same time the age of your major organs. So it's a it's an enormously useful asset.

Mark Hyman
So it's different than the ones that were developed, for example, from the Horiboth clock and epigenetic aging and DNA methylation or Morgan Levine calculated ones that based on wider ranges of DM methylation patterns?

Dr. Leroy Hood
Yeah. The methylation patterns, I think, can accurately assess biological age they can't give you recommendations. So 1 of the advantages is having the analytes that give you the recommendations

Mark Hyman
And just to be clear for people listening, metabolites, basically all the molecules and chemicals and compounds that your body has floating around the blood that regulate everything. When you go to your doctor, you get, like, you know, 20 or 30 analytes, but there may be 1000 or tens of 1000 of these in your blood. And then now we can start to measure these through something called metabolomics which is not part of your regular blood work. Right?

Dr. Leroy Hood
So we typically do a 1000 different metabolites and a 1000 different lipids and thousands of different proteins and measuring the blood from, individuals.

Mark Hyman
And you're able to track how those tracked against biological

Dr. Leroy Hood
agents working. And they give you insights into into how to optimize wellness. Absolutely. But I I just wanted to say a second metric that I think is going to be equally important is your biological BMI, basal metabolic index, which classically was determined by measures of your height and your weight.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. Your

Dr. Leroy Hood
And it turns out it's inaccurate. It doesn't respond to changes. It incorrectly classifies, for example, really muscular people turn out to be extremely Obese.

Mark Hyman
Right.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Criteria. Whereas the metabolic BMI that we use from making analyses with the metabolites is spot on with all of those things, and it actually gives us insights into populations that are somewhat disease metabolically that aren't detected by the old fashioned 1, and it allows us actually to stratify obese patients into really interesting classes. Give you insights on how you can think about treatment and things like that. So

Mark Hyman
But this is an adexxa body composition. This is using metabolites. No.

Dr. Leroy Hood
This is a measurement right out of your blood that assesses many different things. I mean, the really nice thing about the metabolites is you can make 100 of measurements to assess this 1 factor that gives you a an assessment of and it turns out that metabolic diseases are intrinsic to diabetes. They're intrinsic to neurologic degenerative diseases and so forth, and they play a fundamental role in in cancers as well. So they're They're very widespread. So having a good metric is great.

And the final measure we can make from blood, analytes is we can actually assess the diversity in your gut microbiome. And that's key because the more diverse you are the healthy. So, if you can't do the gut microbiome test, you can do, a quantitative test with blood metabolite and boom. You get your gut diversity.

Mark Hyman
So those are the same metrics

Dr. Leroy Hood
we can use to follow patients really effectively. For the future. So that's 1 thing. I take the second thing.

Mark Hyman
And just before you before you before you go on, I just wanna highlight what you just said because I don't wanna skip over it. What doctor had just said is you can take a blood sample and measure what's going on in your gut that the metabolites from your poop essentially are absorbed across your gut lining end up in your blood, and we can measure those. And and I've heard estimates that's anywhere from a third to half of all the metabolites in your blood may be from microbiome, which plays an enormous role in every part of your health journey from every disease we can think of pretty much unless you you know, hit by a car, pretty much every other disease is connected to the microbiome. So it's really a profound thing that you can just get a blood test and look at that. So you're looking at at your biological age.

You're looking at metabolic health, and you're looking at, your your microbiome as metrics attract your health and wellness and deviations from health because you're not actually often measuring a disease with those analytes. You're just measuring deviations from health or how little things that are off, right, on that trajectory.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Right. Right.

Mark Hyman
So I cut you off. Are we gonna say I just I just didn't want to skip over that because

Dr. Leroy Hood
No. That's a really important point. So in a sense, I I wanted to emphasize the fact that there are 3 axes to health, 1 of which is virtually entirely ignored in today's health practice for the most part. So health of your brain, health of your body, and health of your gut microbiome. All 3 of them seamlessly integrate together and they're all absolutely critical in optimizing wellness.

And I think the health of the brain is, is 1 to really emphasize in the sense I can ask most people when's the last time their doctor asked them how their brain was doing, and the answer, of course, is never. And the fact is your brain is an organ just like your heart that needs exercise. Michael Merzentek a close friend at Ugazi Kevili Prize for for brain plasticity demonstrated beautifully for an ordinary person your cognitive features rise to a maximum in your mid thirties. And for most of us, they fade away. What Michael demonstrated is he has measurements to assess and replace loss functions so you can take an 80 year old and with most of them, restore them back to where they might have been in their mid thirties.

So it's enormous hope for all of us.

Mark Hyman
This is

Dr. Leroy Hood
a series of assays called BRAIN HQ. And if there's 1 thing I'd urge you to do to actually exercise your brain in really effective manner, with regard to Escognitive features. It's, it's Brain HQ made by a company called Posit POSIT that you can look up. But Yeah. We'll

Mark Hyman
put the put the link to that in the show notes. So that's really important because we'll put that link to that. It's basically like, you know, crossword puzzles on steroids. And it's it's a way to increase neuroplasticity by using mental exercises and brain training just like you go to the gym for your muscles. You gotta go to the gym for your brain, and that's what this

Dr. Leroy Hood
I'll tell you the most him, famous of all the users of brain HQ is, Tom Brady. Who in his later years used Brain HU 1 to increase his reaction time and 2 to increase his depth of field and it worked magnificently. And he's

Mark Hyman
really 7. 7 Super Bowl rings. I I guess.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Yeah. So, look, all you aspiring third year olds who would like to continue doing this, there's a chance to exercise your brain.

Mark Hyman
That's great.

Dr. Leroy Hood
I I would say the the final point I would make about data is the genome and phenome data is an enormous amount of information. Obviously. So what we've begun to use are the tools of and these include knowledge graphs that connect together all sorts of different types of data They include digital twins that that incorporate high level physiologic data and mechanisms with Omic data and those kinds of things to give us the power to make predictions about diseases such as Alzheimer's. And finally, they include these large language models, and we're now learning how to use those 3 features to convert the digital data of your genome and phenome into language like data that large language models can use So in the future, what we hope to be able to do are 2 really important things. 1, take your genome phenome data and put it in this AI device and have it read out in prioritized order literally hundreds of actionable possibilities you can carry out to optimize your wellness, starting with the most important ones, of course.

And then 2, what we will be able to do is send to your physician those actionable possibilities on the 1 hand explaining them for the physician and what needs to be done but on the other hand, providing the clinical evidence that says these are legitimate actionable possibilities. And can you imagine being, you know, what's really interesting about the genome and phenome is it's exactly like Michael Ansible's statement about a block of granite where he said David is in there. All I have to do is chip away on the edges and we'll have a David. Well, the genome and phenome can assess from your data, your current health, your health trajectory, and tell you how to optimize it, and that's where we're going to be going in the future and that's where we'll have an health care that more and more becomes focused at home with your cell phone and other similar devices that lets you expand your health span out into the nineties or even 100. That is the stage of your life where you're healthy and active aggressive.

And the interesting question is, what are you gonna do with the extra 20 years? And I'll bet you'll get bored just playing tennis

Mark Hyman
and boats. But,

Dr. Leroy Hood
Maybe that's not true. Some people.

Mark Hyman
No. I'm I'm gonna be 65 this year, and I just climbed, a mountain in, Patagonia. And it was 15 miles, in a day, and it was 1, 5000 feet of elevation, a mile up and a mile down. And I read afterwards that it was a 2 day, normally a 2 day trip, and we did it 1 day. It was it was

Dr. Leroy Hood
So you're in you're in great shape.

Mark Hyman
I'm in good shape. Yeah. And, you know, so I think I do wanna sort of pause for a minute because what you said there was so important. I'm not sure everybody, again, I just wanna see if I got it clear. So first of all, The the genome is your genes.

They're fixed. Your phenome is the expression of your genes based on everything that's happened to in your life. What you've eaten, how much you exercise, your thoughts, your relationships, your environment, exposure toxins, your microbiome, all that washes over you. To determine the expression at this moment of who you are due of diabetes.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Are you healthy or fit?

Mark Hyman
And that's what we call the phenome. And that can be measured, and that's changeable. And this is what doctor is talking about is is how we can change our genomic health and and and reverse our trajectory towards disease and actually go back towards health and even optimal health and scientific wellness. And you're talking about 3 key things, which I think are really important. You know, 1 is is this idea of knowledge graphs.

And I and and then digital twins. And and lastly, the the AM machine learning that goes to sort through it all.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Large language models. Yeah.

Mark Hyman
And large language models. So how and how how do you define a knowledge graph people listening. I don't think most people are familiar with that. What is the knowledge graph and what is the digital twin? And and tell us a little bit more about those because that's those are really important concepts because what you're talking about is essentially a revolution in medicine rather than doing large randomized controlled trials with thousands of people and 1, 000, 000 of dollars We're gonna be able to do research in a very different way that's based on what we call animal research.

You're you're at the end, which means number 1, and it's basically research on you, and the NIH has validated this as 1 of the highest levels of research and and evidence, but we don't really take it. We call anecdotes but, really, there's a whole scientific field of NN1 research. So can you kinda unpack knowledge graphs, digital twins, and and then and then explain how a machine learning AI and large language models will will help us understand all that.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Sure. So a knowledge graph is nothing more than going to the medical literature and it's putting in graphical form the relationships between genes and proteins and RNA and disease and different kinds of of physiologic states and so forth. So and and in a sense, you've got a gene as a feature that is connected by a whole series of edges to the things that it actually causes 1 way or another. So the knowledge graph takes medical knowledge, and it creates all the interrelating connections to it. And the usefulness of that is we can actually take your digital information and we can map it right onto a knowledge graph and in doing so, we interconnect you with virtually the entire literature of modern medicine.

So that gives us enormous insights on your specific and unique relationships to to being a human being and so forth. So the digital twin on the other hand usually has an area that it's interested in and and the 1 that we've worked on with collaborators is brain health. And the idea there is you bring in all of the physiologic information at the top with all of the little differential equations about how the brain works and everything. And from the bottom you tie that to homemix and to clinical chemistry and all the other things, and this digital twin thus is a repository of information states for brain wellness, for Alzheimer's, for other Parkinson's other kinds of diseases. And what it enables 1 to do then is on the 1 hand you can create a 1, 000, 000 virtual digital twins modifying different aspects of those relationships to see, for example, what is most useful in extending the period of time before you get and transition to Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.

Or things like that. So it gives you relationships to disease, and we're going to be doing 1 for wellness, which will give us the myriad of relationships for different aspects. So it's

Mark Hyman
almost like an avatar of yourself that you get to do research on and figure out what's going on. Test out different ideas.

Dr. Leroy Hood
And you can make predictions and you can use the digital twin because it gives you mechanistic information to say phosphatidylcholine is really great for delaying the onset of Alzheimer's that an observation that was made with the, that the wellness digital twin, and it's a very, very powerful tool for thinking about how the delay and or even ultimately to prevent the onset of the disease it's been designed to do. Yeah. We're running a big clinical trial with very dense data on diabetes, and we are at the same time making a digital twin now for diabetes. As well. So we can optimize what we've learned most effectively to come back to patients and say Here are the things you need to do to avoid these consequences.

Mark Hyman
So it allow you to really fulfill the dream that you've had, which is p 4 medicine. It's personalized. Right? It's predictive. It's preventive and it's participatory because then you have to do what the the data say, which is change what you're doing in terms of what you're eating and your lifestyle or treatments or drugs or whatever the right approach is.

So it's really fulfilling this vision that you've had for years and really was, was so exciting for me to hear as a practicing physician as someone who was trying to work in this area of systems thinking in biology and medicine. Network medicine, functional medicine, whatever you wanna call it, it's really, you know, the name doesn't matter. It's it's it's idea that the body is 1 interconnected ecosystem. It's a big biological network. It's a network of networks.

And once we get that and understand that, We're not gonna be able to solve the problem of chronic disease. We're gonna be throwing drugs at it. We're gonna be spending lots of money. We're not gonna get any better care. And we're seeing that.

We're spending more money than any other nation. We're getting worse outcomes. Medicare costs for skyrocketing, and and we're we're kind of on a sinking ship. So this really what you're talking about is a revolution that's gonna change all that if it can get adopted. The the thing I worry about is the adoption rate.

And that, you know, what we're talking about essentially is an AI co pilot for your health for you, for your self care, and for your doctor to actually use as a co pilot for their care because there's no way they're gonna understand all this either. The smartest doctor in the world doesn't know every single gene or every single metabolite or every single protein, but, the computer can.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Well, let me say a word or 2 about that because I have thought about that. I remember when for the first time, computer beat a a chess master unequivocally and could beat them every time And what happened is that chess master said, well, if I can't beat the computer, maybe I can join the computer and the 2 of us together can beat any other individuals or any other computers, and he proved that was true. This chimeric relationship of a human who was unbounded in creative thinking and a computer who could do all the calculations and estimate the moves and roots and all of those kind of thing, that worked absolutely beautifully. So what I see is doctors becoming partners with AI because what AI will be able to give the doctor is essentially the equivalent of domain expertise in all fields of medicine. That means you can give your patients the treatment that experts in 50 different fields would give them.

You alone can do that and uniquely offer up, a a kind of medicine we've only dreamed about in the past, but to do it, you have to be willing to be a partner with this computer, and and you want to check the computer and make sure everything is is is standard and and okay and everything, but the idea that we can use then AI to create super docs and make them incredibly efficient. It has, I think, enormous implications for I mean, you're gonna you're gonna convert family practitioners into the equivalent for domain expertise in all fields of medicine, which is Yeah. Has to be an exciting idea for them.

Mark Hyman
It's pretty exciting. Yeah. It sort of reminds me of, you know, being a family doctor in small town in Idaho where we were the only practitioners was 5 of us, 1 1 drunk surgeon and 5 family doctors And

Dr. Leroy Hood
Yeah.

Mark Hyman
And things would come in that I'd never seen before or extremely complicated cases or high risk situations like, you know, premature neonatal, birth where I'd have to, you know, take care of a neonate, that would normally be taken care of in a tertiary care hospital because there was nowhere near it to take care of. And I would literally call the doctor in the the next, biggest town, which is, like, 2 or 3 hours away, and I would talk to the specialist, and they would guide me exactly to do. But think of this on steroids, which is what you're talking about. It says, like, not just 1 doctor. Yeah.

Steroids. And it's it's really an exciting thing because know, when you go to the doctor, you're just getting their experience, their residency, their experience with patients, a very limited set of data. But, you know, you know, right now, we're seeing this in medicine with radiology and ophthalmology and dermatology where, literally, you know, AI has seen billions of images of skin lesions, whereas a dermatologist might see thousands in their life. They're seeing

Dr. Leroy Hood
billions. Yeah.

Mark Hyman
And they're able to track it and do a much better job. And and not that the the computer is gonna be doing your skin biopsy, but it's helping the doctors decide which leisure in biopsy. Which what's what? Yeah. Right.

What's what? Yeah. So it's it's so exciting. I I think, you know, getting getting specific now, you know, you you basically talk about this concept of scientific wellness and getting a yearly checkup and blood draw and look at where you are in the trajectory of your biological age or current trajectory toward disease. And and you're saying, you know, we're able to track things and and actually make a difference, like reversing diabetes, getting rid of cancer, avoiding your preventing or even reversing Alzheimer's, reversing autoimmune diseases.

These are really kind of big claims. And, you know, you're not you're not a kind of a internet influencer who's you know, basically, I read a book and all of a sudden got a million followers and telling people what to do. You're 1 of the leading scientists of this of this generation. And you're talking about this concept in a way that's really scientific. And so the the principles of scientific wellness seem to be offering a breakthrough in a lot of conditions, Alzheimer's, particularly that this is the 1 you worked on.

And so you give us an example and walk through how how this idea that you have created works in something like Alzheimer's and how it's led to a breakthrough in in your thinking about this and how it works as a model then for fighting other chronic diseases or addressing other chronic diseases.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Well, I can, give you a personal story on Alzheimer's. My wife in 2005 was diagnosed with Alzheimer. And, of course, that, as with all families, so diagnosed had a profound impact. And 1 aspect of it was I decided I'd learn everything there was about Alzheimer's, which was really pretty depressing that that point.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. There there were 2 Nothing.

Dr. Leroy Hood
2 things that you could give them that looked like they worked for very short periods of time, if at all. And then I really came to the conclusion that drugs were given mostly for the doctor's sake, not for the Yeah.

Mark Hyman
To make them feel like they're doing something. Right?

Dr. Leroy Hood
But it, you know, it's a it's a progressive kind of disease, but I met, in, 2010, 112, Dale Bredesen, who was a pioneer in thinking about Alzheimer's from a systems point of view and you know, he had this wonderful analogy of the barn roof with 38 holes and those were the deficiencies that Alzheimer's patients had and you had to replace those holes with with the appropriate chemicals and in his particular case. And and you know Dale never really provided the hardcore classic evidence of randomized clinical trials but it turns out almost certainly he was right. There was a trial later from Finland called the finger trial.

Mark Hyman
Figured trial. They

Dr. Leroy Hood
showed, for example, exercise and diet had 2 enormous impacts on Alzheimer's disease and the how long it took to to get it under the

Mark Hyman
And even Richard Isaacson's work also showed that you could, you know, impact and reverse it by using a personalized. And and

Dr. Leroy Hood
it's been confirmed many times over. So I hate the idea that and I'll tell you the digital twin has more than anything else given us a wonderful beginning mechanistic understanding of Alzheimer's disease and shown that basically it's a disease of your metabolism and it really has to do a lot with the failure to be able to deal with LDL cholesterol really effectively. And the the gene that predisposes most to Alzheimer's apoe4 is a gene that manages that whole cholesterol process and all. So anyway, we have really wonderful new mechanistic insights but I think for Alzheimer's there there are 2 really key points 1 is what are the earliest easily detectable signs that a transition has occurred. For example, with a type of scanning called metabolic pet scanning Mike Phelps demonstrated you could actually see changes in your brain metabolism 15 years before you got diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

So I'd like to find a blood marker that does that same thing in a simple non radioactive manner and everything. And we're gonna be setting up next to clinical trial on health and the major focus is going to be the early detection of the earliest transitions because when we detect markers for the transitions, they'll give us clues as to what's gone wrong and we'll be able to reverse the disease at that early stage. But a big part of reversing Alzheimer's, I'll tell you, is dealing with exercise, dealing with diet, dealing with it's absolutely routine things that are under our own control. That can make a big difference in addition to the medical things we'll be discovering as we go on.

Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Well, you're

Mark Hyman
you're right.

Dr. Leroy Hood
So, anyway, my my real hope and my family, for example, has this apoe4 gene And my son, for example, is homozygous for it. So that is a very high risk for Alzheimer's by the time he's in his sixties herself. And what he's doing now that really looks like it's doing that superb job is dealing with diet in major ways, dealing with exercise, ease, and exercise, for that anyway.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Leroy Hood
He runs ultra marathons to give you an idea. So he's he's in great shape, but and he's doing an analysis of his metabolism.

Mark Hyman
85 and does a 100 push ups a day. Right? So

Dr. Leroy Hood
I do a 150 a day.

Mark Hyman
We we keep that. Man. I'm slack King. Jeez. I gotta catch up.

Dr. Leroy Hood
No. Anyway Yeah. Well, he's he's a tremendous athlete. So he'll he'll be able to do that at 85 too.

Mark Hyman
Well, what what you're talking about is so important because we're we're we're we're so in the dark ages now. We wait till we have symptoms and you're talking about these metabolic scans and detecting changes that happened decades before that we can do something about through lifestyle, through exercise, diet. And I, you know, I don't know if you know the story, but I I wrote a book more of a 15 years ago called the Ultra Mind solution, which was a description of how the brain is influenced by everything that goes on in the body and that that we often mistakenly attribute meaning to things like depression or anxiety or ADD or Alzheimer's that that really have nothing to do with the cause and that these conditions are have multiple causes, like the 36 holes in the roof, or 38 holes, and then you have to deal with all of them in order for getting people better. And you have to look deeply at what's going on in their biology. And I, you know, I think, you know, when we typically have an Alzheimer's workup in in today's neurology, it's just, you know, you check your B 12, your thyroid, you know, a few other things.

Pretty superficial. And it's neurocognitive testing, and you can see that they have dementia, but just tells you what they have. It doesn't tell you why. And I and I wrote that book. Now I I was influenced by my patients who would come to me with Alzheimer's or autism ADD, and I would see these radical changes in them when I started to just fix all the holes.

I optimized her gut health they were nutrition deficient in B vitamins. They needed vitamin d. They had heavy metals. I would get rid of those. They were prediabetic.

I would fix that with diet and lifestyle. And I and I had a patient who had a double, yeah, APOE 4 genes.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Homosed to date. Yeah.

Mark Hyman
The wrist the wrist gene. He was about 7 years old. He had really significant cognitive impairment. Couldn't work anymore. He was a civil company.

He was depressed. His family didn't wanna be around him because he was acting crazy. And really kind of gone pretty far along. And we found out that he he, you know, lived in Pittsburgh where they actually coat the streets with coal dust in the winter instead of salt for ice. And, you know, coal is essentially full of mercury and lead.

He also

Dr. Leroy Hood
Right. Right.

Mark Hyman
And that was also where US Steel is and they have factories that spew out coal, effluent, which is full of mercury and lead. And, he also had a mouthful of fillings and so forth. So I checked his mercury level. It was off the chart. We treated that.

We treated his insulin resistance, which was severe at years gut issues. You know, the microbiome plays a role in Alzheimer's. We optimize his gut health, his bacterial overgrowth. He had high home assist teams. We had problems in methylation.

Again, be 12 full length efficiency, and we just kinda worked on everything. And he literally woke up, like, for Ben We'd call him. They were able to function again, and he part of his business again, if you're with his family again, And I was like, holy crap. What is going on here? I just Yep.

I'm just applying the principles of treating the system, not that symptoms, treating the and And so I wrote this book. And then Dale's wife, I don't know if you know this. She's a functional medicine doctor. She read the book. She gave it to Dale, he read the book.

He's like, oh my god. I've been in the lab. I need to just make so much sense. I'm gonna show this is true. So he took that and actually ended up

Dr. Leroy Hood
That's where he started.

Mark Hyman
Oh, that's right.

Dr. Leroy Hood
That's interesting story.

Mark Hyman
That's right. That's right. That's cool. And so, I mean, I get, obviously, can't take all the credit because he's all got a lot further with it, but was just my clinical observations that people had so many different things going on. And so this is the future of health care, rather than a single drug for a single disease.

It's a multi modal interventions, meaning multiple things at the same time to fix the things that are wrong, and they're going to be different for each person. There's no thing as Alzheimer's, there are many variations and individual subtypes and individual abnormalities that are unique to each person, whether diabetes or heart disease or Alzheimer's or cancer. And we're we're labeling people with these diseases that it's almost meaningless today. I don't care what the name of the disease is. I wanna know what's going on underneath the hood.

And then, actually, it's like saying you have a red car. Well, is it is a Porsche or is it a Volkswagen or is it

Dr. Leroy Hood
a Ford?

Mark Hyman
Or, you know, it's like, okay. Well, I don't know.

Dr. Leroy Hood
We'll fix what's under the hood. We won't worry about what the hood says. Yeah.

Mark Hyman
Exactly. Exactly. So I I think this is is such an exciting moment in medicine, and I I think I'm so excited about the things you're discovering because It's it's translating into, you know, a different way of thinking about disease, which is a problem, I think, in medicine. We have a thinking problem. And and, you know, I don't know how you've come to be so open minded and have such a vision of the future and, you know, it's it's it's really often dealing in entrenched ways with the current paradigm.

I mean, no, I think Thomas Coon wrote about this in the structure of scientific revolutions.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Revolution. Yeah.

Mark Hyman
Normal science and how tough it is to change scientists way of thinking about a problem, and it often, you know, has to wait till they die and get a new version of it. And I I think this is coming fast. So can you tell us, you know, all the work you've done and and everything that you're doing now with a phenome health project how far are we from actually getting this into, the clinic, the bedside, or even bypassing the health care system and people and be able to use this for their own self assessment and care.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Well, I think, let me just say that we're taking 2 major approaches to phenomics. 1 is with individuals to optimize their wellness and prevent disease. And the second is with disease to use big data to understand it in ways we've never understood it before. Yeah. In that latter case, we're starting the diabetes trial, within the month, and we'll be starting Simers trial within, hopefully, 6 months to

Mark Hyman
9 months. These are big, expensive trials,

Dr. Leroy Hood
but they'll tell us more in the 4 year periods than we've learned in the last 50 years about the inner workings of all these things. So phenomenics, I think from the disease point of view is, and and there are many people doing these kinds of studies at different levels. So it's but on the individual level, I think we're actually talking with a health care system. We haven't come to a final agreement but we've basically agreed to start with their executive health program and then move down to their family practice program. And if a major healthcare system takes this on and over a period of 5 years shows that everything works as it did for aerofale I think we'll be well on our way to convincing the, skeptics and so forth.

But I I do wanna say 1 of the proposals I've made is this idea that we do a second genome project, which is called the human phenome initiative, where we analyze at government expense a million people over a 10 year period And that will do 3 things. 1, it will unequivocally demonstrate an enormous increase in quality of data driven health. Number 2, we can show cost savings that are going to be staggering from preventing chronic diseases by that time. And and again, 86% of our health care budget is spent on chronic diseases. So if we can begin to eliminate diabetes and, Alzheimer's, heart

Mark Hyman
disease, yeah.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Heart disease and and cancers it's going to have a major impact and the third thing is we'll optimize the phenomic analyses most of them in the future can be done at home, and and your health will be an aspect of your home and so forth. And, you know, I would just like to make a word about, health and how important it is because Health underpins all of the uniquely human qualities that we treasure, your early development, your education, your work and your jobs, your community, and, communication with others, but creativity and thinking out of the box and all of these things. And most important, it's going to really expand your health span. As I said, into the nineties or even 100. And if you have a purpose and a commitment to life, you'll be able to use all the wisdom you've stimulated, during your earlier lifetime to really benefit society at the end.

And that's where I think we need to have an education program that begins to have people thinking about this in their teens and not wait until they're in their eighties or seventies or sixties, to think about it. I think with any paradigm change, education is utterly critical unless you wanna wait forever.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, people I think are are scared of AI and and there's been a lot of fear mongering around it. And I think it is a concern in many ways. Although right now, a lot of our life is driven by AI algorithms that determine what we see on social media, like a sort

Dr. Leroy Hood
of interest

Mark Hyman
on Netflix and You know, it's like, we're already we're already being gobbled up. Our data is being gobbled up by AI and and being directed at us. But people worry about it in other ways. I understand that. And and I think in health care, it's 1 of the use cases that I I'm most excited about.

And I think it has the potential to help us, like you said, have an AI co pilot for doctors and for individuals. And You know, I think in in the company, I co found it called function health, we're basically creating a model where we're, you know, allow people to get access to their own data. It's democratized. They they can have an interpretive model that actually is based on the evidence based on their own biology that allows them to see where they are in the trajectory and then modify things to change their life. And it's It's so exciting.

I think, you know, you mentioned this million person project. Isn't that all of us? There's a NIH study that's called all of us. It's looking I thought at the same thing looking at metabolone.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Well, they're not doing phenomics. They're just doing genomics and, some digital health and electronic health records, but it's the phenomics. And most important, it's returning the results to the people so they can optimize their health. NIH is a big research project, and I'm not knocking to I think it's gonna be very valuable and it's wonderful. NICSS partners rather than competitors.

Mark Hyman
We need a $1, 000, 000, 000 from the next president to fund the human phenome project, basically. Would that be good?

Dr. Leroy Hood
That would be that would get it started. There is no question whatsoever. Yeah.

Mark Hyman
A billion just to get started. Oh god. Okay. Yeah.

Dr. Leroy Hood
I Well, but, you know, if if you say it will cost less than 2, be 2 bombers. You know, do you wanna trade bombing in the Middle East? For a new health care system that makes everybody well. That's that's the argument I've made to Congress. And I think people will recognize that.

It isn't a great time, 2 wars, polarization, all of that kind of thing, but But if you're stubborn and I am really stubborn, I'm gonna keep beating these drums until we we get this human genome initiative. Yeah.

Mark Hyman
So, Lee, for for you, you're 85. Right? You you, have been tracking this for whole life. You've been developing this field. You've done deep phenotyping on yourself, I would assume.

Food genomics, metabolome, microbiome, and What have you learned in your deep phenotyping of yourself that it's been a surprise and what have you learned this help you change your behavior or health practices that have improved the quality of your health and life?

Dr. Leroy Hood
Well, I think 1 thing

Mark Hyman
I remember comfortable talking about that. I think it's Oh, sure.

Dr. Leroy Hood
No. I'm I'm totally comfortable. 1 thing, I'm an exercise fanatic, and I think exercise has made an enormous difference in my health. And I'm a big 1 who believes, hyperoxygenation of the brain that comes from dynamic exercise is really a healthy thing for your brain every day. I mean, the parts that succumb to Alzheimer's are the parts that get least oxygenated.

So the more oxygen we can put in there the better off we are. I would say the second thing is in in the course of Veravail, I lost about £25. You know, I'd gradually like I was in good shape, but I weighed a £195 and now I weigh a 170 and it's what I played, college football at. Amazing. Okay.

And now I'm sure there's somewhat more fat than the muscle I had when I was in college, but, but I'll tell you losing weight makes an enormous difference in both people's perception of their self and how they feel. So III think that's really important, but looking that my genome and learning. I had 1 copy of the APO E 4 gene, so I had to worry about Alzheimer's too and had a family history of that. And and, again, there there are diet recommendations for that. There are certainly exercise recommendations for that And certainly I check lots of supplements and metabolites and vitamins and keep my blood chemistries optimized to the extent they can be optimized.

The story you told about bringing a person back from Alzheimer's to a functional individual is moving. You know, I, I have friends that have done exactly the same for Alzheimer's patients and the south that are exposed to black mold. And if you take them out of a black mold environment, boom. You can see remarkable changes immediately. So there are environmental toxins, as you pointed out, that have enormous impact and we can get rid of them.

If, you know, what

Mark Hyman
actually 1 of the 1 of the treatments I actually, I use for the brain, is for treating mold is intravenous phosphatidylcholine. And was so you mentioned that before as a compound that's really important in, regulating your risk of Alzheimer's and Right. Actually, it's a therapy for for mold. Yeah. But were were there any other analytes that you found that you were surprised about?

You found the APOE gene. I mean, the exercise dye weight loss all makes sense, but were there things in your in your phenome that were like, oh my god. I didn't know that. And I am actually going to change what I'm doing based on that

Dr. Leroy Hood
Well, I'll tell you the the biggest things I found that made a difference is, on my initial blood tests with Aravail. I had a blazing the high, mercury level. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. It came from eating sushi tuna.

I stopped eating sushi tuna and that mercury level drop, right? You know, after 6 months or so back down down to normal and so forth. So,

Mark Hyman
But for example, you might see in your metabolites a low glutathione. Which is the compound that helps you get rid of mercury. Right? You would pick that up, but wouldn't be on your own blood test, but you might find it when you did a deep phenotyping. And then you'd know you need to eat these certain vegetables that up regulate glutathione or needs to actually take and achieve a cysteine that up regulates glutathione.

There's supplements you could take. There's dietary things you can take. And so there's ways you can actually even enhance your practices to actually reduce your risk further.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Yeah. I think good functional medicine docs in people like yourself that have really learned these things are absolutely invaluable. And I try and refer all of my close friends to those kind of physicians because Yeah. Reading what they're asking for is how can I optimize my wellness? Can I find a doctor that is in sync with me?

You know, it was interesting that Aravail, 1 of the limitations we had is we didn't have physicians. So it meant when we had pathologic conditions, we had to give those to the patient and then say take this to the doctor and have him or her make the diagnosis. And it turned out that about a third of the doctors really engaged and were wildly enthusiastic about this. A third of the doctors were utterly indifferent and said I'm too busy. Don't bother me with these kind of things.

And a third were enormously defensive. And I'll tell you those defensive physicians really lost a lot of their arophilic patients. Guts. Yeah. We said go find someone who's gonna work with you and not fight you.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's true because, you know, it's a lot of confrontation. If you go to a physician and you have all this data that 1 they don't understand that they've never learned about that. They don't know what to do about. It's a little bit intimidating, and then you're kinda challenging their authority.

And and and it's unfortunate because we should all be curious we showed me, like, what does that mean? And is that valid?

Dr. Leroy Hood
And that was the 3rd who responded. They said Yeah. Help me learn about these things and, you know, they were a pleasure to work with.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's pretty exciting. You know, last last thing I wanna sort of dive into for a few minutes. The the the computational tools that you've developed for these analysis of your genome and your phenome and how you kinda how it gets to dice decipher the complexity of the phenomics and then translate it into actionable things that each person can do to optimize their health and prevent disease because I I mean, it's a little abstract. I wonder if you can help us understand a little bit more because while AI computers help, it's like a lot but but you're kinda deep in the science of of this.

As a biologist, you're also really deep into the sort of multiomic analysis through through, computational biology?

Dr. Leroy Hood
Well, let let me just say that we have built a computational platform that 1 has the ability to store enormous amounts of data and to be able to move that data up to the cloud to analyze it effectively. All the major analyses now and in the future are going to be done in the cloud. But the other thing this platform has done is you get the data in buckets. There's a protein bucket and a metabolite bucket and, got microbiome bucket and the genome bucket and we've developed a platform that has the ability to take various of the buckets and integrate the data together in such a way that it reveals biology. And this essentially are a simple way to look at it is interesting statistical correlations that suggest there is a unique relationship and it's these relationships that lead to actionable possibilities.

And it's the integration then of all of these different type of data that really expand out the number of actionable possibilities.

Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Leroy Hood
So when I look at the genome, you know, there are 7 different levels of actionable possibilities there. When I look at the phenome, you can do supplements and vitamins and and things in in the blood, you can you can check your metabolites and your proteins you can and and so forth, but where you really get the actionable possibilities is are when you start putting different types of data together because what that exposes is relationships in your body that are significant. Okay. It's almost as if the integration of the data begins reassembling the complexity of your own only it does it in a sense where you can do statistics, find the correlations, and then identify the actionable possibilities. And we believe that with the human phenome initiative, a million people that will will find easily 10, 000 plus actionable possibilities that again will be available to all physicians and to all patients, and it'll be a part of making every physician an expert in all fields of medicine.

So it's it's really It it's going to be so transformational what we'll be able to do. You know, 1 of the really interesting questions is how well do you wanna be? Because, you know, you're the conductor of your own wellness and you handled your diet you handled your environment, you handled your exercise, your sleep, all of these things are really important elements of wellness, and and you know, I think we have to learn to embrace these opportunities so as to enhance all the potential we really have because In the end, as I said earlier, health potentiates every single good and unique thing about human beings.

Mark Hyman
That's true. Know, it's true what you're saying. You know, Benjamin Frankel said, you know, an ounce of prevention is where the pound would cure. And and it's a lot easier to to prevent all the things. If catch them early.

And and this is what you're talking about is how do you define health? How do you scientifically measure it? How do you measure through deviations from health? And then what do you do about those things? And that's something we really haven't done in medicine at all.

Like, I I don't think I never took a course in medical school called the science of creating health 101. I did it wasn't there. I I did pathophysiology and diseases. And, you know, when you were talking, it just reminded me of this case that I I mentioned earlier about dementia. We didn't we didn't have the capacity to do, you know, metabolomics and proteomics and lots of other things.

But we did pretty deep phenotyping, and we we did certain snips as as genes. And we found, for example, that he had jeans and impaired his ability to make glutathione, which is important for getting rid of mercury. We found he had genes that affected his risk of insulin resistance, which he had, which causes, you know, type 3 diabetes or Alzheimer's in the brain. Yeah. We found that he had genes, for example, that affected cholesterol metabolism, the CTP gene that we also were able to treat We also found we had, methylation problems, which is genes that have to do with the vitamin regulation, MTHFR.

So we had combinations of all these genes And then he had the phenotype that went along with it. Right? He had Right. Low wood fire, high mercury, high homocysteine. He had, you know, lipid abnormalities.

He had in some resistance. And then we also looked at his gut microbiome and found bacterial overgrowth. And we treated all these different things like fixing the 36 holes in the roof. And I didn't know what I was doing. I just, well, I don't know.

Let's just try this because I mean, I know how to get you a healthier. I don't know if it's gonna affect your brain. Let's try, and it did. And I did on this over and over in functional medicine. And and now with the deep science we have with the capacity to measure or phenotype in such a a more profound way at such a lower cost.

And when you met in 1985 to decide if you do the human genome project, It was a multi $1, 000, 000, 000 effort. Right? And that was the fear. It was a multi $1, 000, 000, 000 gonna take away money from other good scientists doing good work. Now you can get the your whole genome sequence for a few hundred bucks.

You know? So even though now it's it seems still like a far reach. I mean, You know, I I remember, you know, you know, I can my first computer had, I think, I had had 1 megabyte of RAM in 4 megabytes of hard drive, and it was $35100. You know? Now I have a 4 terabyte little hard drive that's this big that I got for on the box.

You know? Yeah. So I think I think this is gonna happen also with diagnostics and testing. The costs are gonna come down. The ease ease of doing, it's gonna come in the ability to kind of integrate this.

And I think like you said, in a simplified institutions, It's it's not it's not coming from there. It's coming from people like you who stepped outside of traditional institutions who built their own institutions and and and, it reminds me of Buckingham Fuller quote that, you know, you don't have to try to change your system. You just have to make a new 1 that's makes the old 1 obsolete. And I think that's really quickly

Dr. Leroy Hood
what's happening here.

Mark Hyman
It's really true. So I just wanna thank you for your work. Thank you for your dedication for being there, every day and and, taking this field forward over the last 50 plus years or more 60 years, 65 years probably not a long time. As long as I've been alive, for sure.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Yeah.

Mark Hyman
And, and, I think, you know, I'm I I hope you can keep working together and learning together. I think this is just 1 of the most exciting times of medicine, health care. And, such a privilege to be able to know you and to hear your vision and have people hear what you're talking about as really the future of everything we're gonna be doing. So thanks so much, doctor. Being on the podcast.

Dr. Leroy Hood
Well, in the end, it's all about having fun. Right, Mark?

Mark Hyman
That's right. That's right.

Dr. Leroy Hood
I think we both are having fun.

Mark Hyman
Okay. Thank you. Exactly. Alright. Well, thank you so much, Lee.

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