Way, way back in the late 20th century, geneticist Craig Venter used to carry a plastic card with a man’s picture on it and a “holographic information-bearing silicon chip.” Venter would show people the card and tell them it contained “every bit of the man’s genetic code.”
“It could tell you that his chances of getting cancer before age 60 were almost four out of 10,” writes Chip Walter in his new book, “Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever,” (National Geographic), out Jan. 7.
“It revealed whether he might have a genetic tendency toward some mental or emotional illness, and explained that he was among the 30 percent of the population that benefitted from taking aspirin to fight heart disease. Armed with this information, the man could decide what sort of diet might be best for him, explore the time of day he was most productive, maybe even improve his chances of finding a compatible mate.”
The card was revolutionary. It was also fake.
Fully 30 percent [of patients] had “some serious problem that they had been otherwise unaware of.”
- Author Chip Walter on Venter's life-saving genetic sequence program”
But Venter was not a fraudster. Rather he was a visionary who believed that “once genomes were cheap enough to be sequenced, the day would come when people would have that card in their hands and take control of their lives.”
Walter’s book explores how scientists are trying to achieve that lofty goal. So far, Venter, a 1975 Ph.D. in psychology and pharmacology who led the first successful effort to sequence the human genome in 2000, has gone further than most.
In 2014, Venter and two partners opened the San Diego-based Human Longevity, Inc., and offered the service Health Nucleus where, for $25,000, anyone could be “biologically scrutinized.”
Funded with $70 million from investors, the company claimed it would focus on “extending the healthy, high-performance human life span” and tackle “the diseases associated with aging-related human biological decline,” according to a press release.
“Whoever signed on to Health Nucleus would not only have their genomes inspected,” Walter writes, “but also their bodies, brains, gaits, and bone density — even their metabolites and microbiomes — all the better to delay the inevitable date of their particular demise.”
Around 12 doctors, scientists and/or staffers are devoted to each Health Nucleus client, who start the process by filling out a detailed online health questionnaire, providing Human Longevity with “every bit of medical information possible: recent blood tests, brain scans or MRIs, histories of surgery or illness — as much phenotypic information as possible,” Walter writes.
Then, clients arrive for an extensive eight-hour battery of tests at the Human Longevity offices. First, clients give the “20 or so vials of blood … needed to entirely sequence the subject’s genome, all three billion base pairs.”
Unlike the services provided by companies such as Ancestry or 23andme, which only examine certain portions of a client’s DNA, Human Longevity sequences each patient’s entire genetic code, which future research will hopefully be able to decipher at a later date.
“They may not understand much of what it means right now,” Walter writes, “but only by gathering the information in the first place can the great AI algorithms hope to unpeel their secrets.”
In addition, Health Nucleus gathers two other “omes”: the metabolome and microbiome. “Sampling the metabolome allows scientists to analyze the trillions upon trillions of small molecules roaming within and among the cells of the body that drive millions of yet unknown pathways within.” Meanwhile, the microbiome contains “10 times the genetic information the human genome does, and affects diet, health, disease, and even emotion.”
Clients then spend 90 minutes having “every centimeter of their brains and body scanned” using “the highest resolution MRI scans in the world, [with] resolutions fine enough to pick out … signs of neuronal shrinkage or cancer tumors the size of a pea.”
Then, a DEXA bone-density scan “reveals not only how much muscle a subject has in comparison with body fat, but where the muscle and fat themselves reside — a key indicator of health, or lack of it.”
Clients are then subjected to tests assessing their movement, as “a shaky gait can reveal the earliest signs of dementia,” while cognitive tests measure the brain’s reaction time and other factors.
The program started with 50 control subjects. In a study conducted when the program had worked up to just over 200 participants, Human Longevity discovered “diseases related to aging that were serious enough to warrant treatment within the next month” in 8 percent of them. Early-stage cancers were detected in 2 percent. One woman, just 27, discovered a brain aneurysm that she was able to have removed.
“It is possible she could have lived a long life with the aneurysm in there waiting to explode,” Venter says in the book.
But chances are that one day, the vessel would have blown out.
“Her first, and last, symptom would have been bleeding to death through her nose,” Venter says.
One elderly couple had their Health Nucleus checkup the day before they were set to embark on a vacation overseas. But the tests detected “a cancer tumor beneath the breastbone of the husband that had been missed in previous exams.”
“Not long after the surgery, the man contacted Venter to say the exam ruined their vacation, but saved his life. So, thanks.”
Two years after the program began Human Longevity had studied 500 people and found that fully 30 percent had “some serious problem that they had been otherwise unaware of,” Walter writes.
These were people who had no symptoms and believed themselves perfectly healthy. The Health Nucleus findings had potentially helped prolong their lives.
For Venter, all this was a validation. His dream that every person could one day carry a card imprinted with their DNA information was one step closer to reality.
While Venter parted ways with Human Longevity in May 2018 in a bitter dispute over the project’s costs, the company still offers a range of DNA sequencing services for $25,000 or less, and has now analyzed more than 3,000 people — 40 percent of whom have now discovered previously unknown health issues. There are plans to expand the program through a widespread series of partnerships with doctors and medical facilities.
Venter, 73, has even benefited from his own research. After taking the Health Nucleus tests himself, he was diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer in fall 2016. He subsequently had surgery and was found to be “free of the disease.”
This was yet another sign that “Human Longevity could help millions dodge the bullets of their own death,” Walter writes. “[Venter] himself was the proof.”