At Thorne, we believe good health and wellness is a journey, not a destination. 

In our society’s health-care model, there’s a reactive approach to diagnosis and treatment – find the health concern and fix it. But why wait until a health concern arises? Can we turn our reactive health-care model into a proactive health-span model? 

And how can we use data and science to drive healthy aging and optimize wellness?

These questions and more are explored in The Age of Scientific Wellness, a new book co-authored by Dr. Nathan Price, Chief Scientific Officer at Thorne HealthTech, and Dr. Lee Hood, a pioneer in human genomics whose work helped launch the Human Genome Project. 

In their book, Drs. Price and Hood explore how we are on the cusp of an exponential leap in medicine. They suggest that real precision health – a form of highly personalized care they call “scientific wellness” – is the new frontier of medicine. Using information gleaned from blood and genes and tapping into the data revolution made possible by artificial intelligence, health-care practitioners can catch the onset of a disease years before its symptoms arise. Scientific wellness is centered on the reversal of disease at the earliest transition, before its serious symptoms manifest.

The authors explain the concept of biological aging, which is the age your body says you are opposed to the age the calendar says you are. They present a vision of health care where wellness is highly personalized and data-driven, leading to lives free from the chronic pain and mental and physical discomforts that come with aging. 

“Too often as a society, we wait until it’s much too late to deal with a disease,” Price says. “The goal of scientific wellness is to deal with the complexity of health and disease via algorithms to arrive at simple, actionable recommendations for what will most improve the health of each individual.”

One area of interest today’s health-care system has long ignored is brain health. Without a healthy brain, a long lifespan becomes more of a burden. Hood and Price present ways the medical community can explore longer health spans – the number of healthy years a person lives – rather than only how many years the person lives. The Age of Scientific Wellness explores which information should be collected and monitored about each person’s health, and how knowing this information will revolutionize the ability to optimize wellness.

This future is already happening at top hospitals and exclusive health-tech enterprises. Scientists are working closely with patients on extending their “health spans” – the number of healthy years before a chronic disease sets in. The principles of scientific wellness already have offered breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s research and include work to prevent and treat cancers as part of the Biden Administration’s Cancer Moonshot project.

Today, relatively few patients have access to this new approach to health care. To make this approach accessible, The Age of Scientific Wellness shares actionable insights to help its readers chart a course to a longer, healthier, and more fulfilling life.

“We each have to realize that in the end we are the captains of choosing the pathway for our individual health trajectory,” Hood said in a recent episode of The Thorne Podcast. “I would urge individuals who care about these things to read [our] book, because it clearly states the many different things you can do to take responsibility for guiding the trajectory of your own health.”

About the authors

Dr. Leroy “Lee” Hood received his MD from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and his PhD in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology. He was a faculty member at Caltech from 1967-1992. During this period, he and his colleagues developed four sequencer and synthesizer instruments that paved the way for the Human Genome Project’s successful mapping and understanding of the human genome. His many national and international awards include the Lasker Prize, the Kyoto Prize, and the National Medal of Science. Currently, Dr. Hood is the Chief Executive Officer of Phenome Health and co-founder and professor at the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington.

Dr. Nathan Price is Chief Scientific Officer of Thorne HealthTech. Previously he was Chief Executive Officer of Onegevity, an AI health intelligence company that merged with Thorne in 2021. Dr. Price earned his PhD in bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego in 2005. Co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications, he was named as one of 10 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, received a Healthy Longevity Catalyst Award from the National Academy of Medicine in 2020, and in 2021 was appointed to the Board on Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

What are the reviews saying?

“A remarkable vision of the near future of healthcare from two of the leading innovators of our age.” – David Sinclair, PhD, author of Lifespan

“Drawing on their own research, Hood and Price make a compelling argument that we should be investing in health, instead of focusing on ineffective repairs.” – Esther Dyson, Executive Founder of Wellville

“This revolutionary book shows what every one of us can do – doctors and patients alike – to jump-start the exciting new era of scientific wellness.” – Sara Gottfried, MD, Director of Precision Medicine at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health and New York Times bestselling author of Women, Food, and Hormones

“A must-read for understanding the new era of data-driven medicine.” – David Agus, MD, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Illness

“This is probably the most important self-help book you will ever read – it will impact your quality of life for decades. Not only does it clearly explain recent revolutions in genomics, AI, aging, neuroplasticity, etc., it shows how you can harness them.” – George Church, PhD, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and founder of Nebula Genomics

“If you want to understand how the latest advances in genomics and AI can completely transform your health, and to translate this promise into practical tools that you can apply today, read this book!” – Mark Hyman, MD, Senior Advisor to the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and author of Food Fix and Young Forever

“This is a lively, optimistic, indeed cheerful book with a clear message: focusing on preserving health provides the best means of forestalling illness, both individually and in the population at large. The approach to scientific wellness that they advocate is truly visionary.” – Roger M. Perlmutter, former President of Merck Research Laboratories

 “Fresh, thoughtful, and unusually ahead of the curve. This is an eye-opening roadmap for the future of health as an active patient partnership from the best scientific minds of our time.” – Thom Mount, former President of Universal Pictures and Vice Chairman of Brainreader

“The Age of Scientific Wellness pulls no punches: humans and the medical system are ill. Hood and Price provide a bold roadmap to wellness built on biology, computer science, and medicine.” – Jeff Wilke, former CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer

You can order the book The Age of Scientific Wellness: Why the Future of Medicine Is Personalized, Predictive, Data-Rich, and in Your Hands from Harvard/Belknap Press or wherever books are sold.