The Pioneer
The frontier and an appetite for the unknown, goes first.
Dr Andrew Steele emerges in this interview as a quintessential Pioneer, navigating the frontier where physics meets biology and where laboratory science meets economic and policy transformation. Steele traces his unconventional trajectory from Oxford physicist to computational biologist, driven not by convention but by the conviction that aging is biology's most consequential unsolved problem.
“And so maybe we need to have innovation prizes. Maybe we need to have accelerated approval pathways. Maybe we need to be thinking about integrating these trials into healthcare systems as they exist at the moment. There are loads of big policy questions. The economic questions are vast.”
“And as people got wealthier and education started to kick in and that helps, then we did get vaccines with a bit more of a vengeance toward the end of the 18th, early end of the 19th, early 20th centuries. We got antibiotics in the middle of the 20th century. And that really did a number on infant and child mortality.”
“If you think about the US healthcare system, that's four or five trillion dollars a year. A huge fraction of that is chronic diseases of aging. And that's because something like dementia, actually, you don't very often die of dementia. It's not necessarily in the top causes of death.”
“And there's a sense in which that's a lowball estimate because that's slowing down aging by a year, keeping people alive for an extra year and obviously healthy for that extra year as well. They worked out, it basically went up linearly.”
Money Maze Podcast: “Can We Live Longer? What it Might Mean for Medicine, Money, & Markets - With Dr Andrew Steele”
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