Have I Got News for You!

Angus Deaton is right! No, not ‘TV’s Mr. Sex’, the Nobel Laureate in Economics better known for dealing with a different kind of public affair. Angus says that the release of humanity from poverty, disease, and early death has aided an unprecedented rise in life expectancy in only two centuries. Nostalgically, he refers to this as ‘the Great Escape’, but I don’t recall motorcycle stunts being integral to our success.

In a cruel twist of fate, the march of progress has delivered a world filled with doughy humanoids, rising in size like a sickly loaf overcooking in the oven. These so-called sapiens burden the NHS to the tune of billions every year, as the proportion of life spent in poor health grows. Currently, roughly a quarter of UK adults are obese and nearly half will be by 2030, which would amount to an extra 6.5 million cases of the most common disease in our industrialised nation: heart disease.

‘Silence!’ - I hear you cry. All of us feel guilty enough as it is without my condescending factual waft. Well, you can alleviate much of that guilt by realising that both obesity and heart disease involve genetic influences, which interact with environmental factors such as diet and smoking to dictate each individual’s level of risk. In order to understand these conditions, the latest genetics research suggests exploring the interplay of genes and environment, damage and repair, and inflammation (or ‘inflammaging’, if you enjoy pointless portmanteaus).

Terrifyingly, advances in machine learning are enabling the development of AI that outperforms humans in many tasks like Go, chess, and protein folding, and are empowering (and maybe one day overpowering) scientists with tools to better diagnose, prevent, and treat disease. I am aiming to apply these novel tools to multidimensional and longitudinal datasets to predict heart disease risk and contribute to the development of healthcare that can sustain longer lives while extending healthy life expectancy, at least until our future overlords come to shake us from our happy place with their funky light-up cyborg boots proclaiming, ‘Have I Got News for You!’