Instant Genius - How future tech will help you stay healthier for longer

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Rapid advances in technology over the past several decades have impacted almost every area of our lives. It could be argued that innovations in medicine and healthcare are one of technology’s biggest success stories. However, many of us are still living in poor health, particularly in our later years. Can technology once again come to our rescue and help us to not only live longer lives but to help us to stay healthier for longer? In this episode, we speak to technology journalist and author Lara Lewington about her latest book Hacking Humanity: How Technology Can Save Your Health and Your Life. She tells us how me may soon all have a ‘digital twin’ containing all of the data about our bodies and health that can be used to test the efficacy of drugs before we take them, the increasing role robotics can play in the operating theatre and the huge impact that the AI revolution can have on the future of healthcare. To get the exclusive gift box from Shokz, order via this link: ⁠https://bit.ly/4kFt10l⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate

with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.S. College PC. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Enough. Enough to get lost! Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job posts the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms

and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials,

delivering digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bidesized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, a commissioning editor of BBC Science Focus.

Rapid advances in technology over the past several decades have impacted almost every area of our lives. It could be argued that innovations in medicine and healthcare, are one of technology's biggest success stories. However, many of us are still living in poor health, particularly in our later years. Can technology once again come to our rescue and help us not only to live longer lives,

but to help us stay healthier for longer? In this episode, we speak to technology journalist and author, Lara Lewington, about her latest book, Hacking Humanity, how technology can save your health and your life. She tells us how we may soon all have a digital twin, containing all of the data about our bodies and health that can be used to test the efficacy of drugs before we take them. The increasing role robotics can play in the operating theatre and the huge impact that the AI revolution can have on the future of healthcare.

So welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me. So today we're talking about your book, Hacking Humanity, how technology can save your health and your life. So I think one of the biggest breakthroughs in all of science really over the last several decades or so is being the huge increase in our knowledge of genes and the human genome. So I think that's as good a place to start as any. So we've known quite a well now that some of us carry genetic risks for certain, you know, life-shortening diseases.

And more and more people are having these at-home DNA tests. But what information can these actually give us? Yeah, well, they can provide you. with a lot of information, but not all of it, is hugely useful. So we know a lot more about genetics than we have done in the past, but there's still a huge amount that we don't know. And also, we want actionable insights. So we don't want to just be told that we're at high risk of something

if there's nothing we can do about it because that's likely to just instill panic. But if there is something we can do about it, that it's completely different. And Genomics England has been doing various different projects. including the newborn study where they've been testing the DNA of newborns who have a genetic risk of rare diseases. Now, rare diseases are actually quite common because there are a lot of them. So in some of these cases, it can be absolutely life-changing to diagnose them early. It can avert blindness, for example. But for your average person to take one of these tests, well, there's probably fairly limited use now,

but in the future we'll learn a lot more about the genome, so more will become a parram, more will become actionable. But we will also start to find other uses for it, like understanding the impact of certain medicines that we take, will know what will work for who and maybe at what dose. So we are at the beginning of something very useful. One expert said to me, it makes sense to go with the grain of the healthcare system that you're in. So if you are doing it through a healthcare professional, we are probably doing it for a useful purpose. If you're sitting at home doing it by yourself, well, that use may be fairly limited. Some people like to know lots about themselves and won't panic and it's fine. And the companies send you back this information

with varying levels of confidence. So you might interpret it in a sensible way. But not everybody is going to really understand what they're sent. There's a load of data and a lot of it that has very low confidence as well. So having said that, do you think there'll come a day when, say, someone has had a child and all newborn children will have their DNA sequenced? Well, actually, the 10-year health plan is aiming that in 10 years' time, all babies in the UK would have their full genome sequence. So it is quite plausible that that could be where we're heading. Yeah, so say someone has had a child and some risk has been detected. You mentioned there sort of things like lifestyle factors that we can perhaps do, perhaps should all be doing

in a way. But can we use sort of these gene editing techniques to correct these faulty genes or these faulty mutations? Well, I think there's quite a lot to unpack here because gene editing is currently something spoken about in extreme and quite serious medical conditions. Although I spoke to a cardiologist who actually referred to a gene that causes people to not be able to control their cholesterol

and therefore leads to a heightened risk of heart disease. And in those people, he perceives a future that instead of taking daily medication, that maybe a gene edit could be what happens. So there are circumstances in which that could happen, but I think we're probably more likely to understand our risk in terms of better predicting when illness might strike, so we can predict better, we can scream better, and hopefully we might be able to prevent better based on that information.

So this is kind of what has become known as personalised medicine. And I think one really interesting example that you talk about is the digital twin. Yes. And right now, there are digital twins for smart cities, for buildings, ways of digitally recreating something to put all the data in a computer system and be able to visualize it, normally with an accompanying image so that you can actually see what's happening where. And just think how amazing it would be to be able to do that to the human body, adding in all of our data, all the information about us that we have. So right now, there are elements of the human body that have been built into digital twins,

but there are companies, universities, research institutes, looking at the idea of a future where we might be able to recreate our entire body with all of that information. So you could then digitally test the impact of an operation or a drug and understand, based on data, a little bit like what happens with AI drug discovery in a lab, what is likely to work and what the side effects could be. So sticking with this sort of personal side of things then, so these days a lot of people wear these fitness trackers and watches and things.

And now that's all well and good. But we've already got wearable devices for measuring blood sugar, for example, in diabetics. And you mentioned the increasing miniaturisation of ECGs, etc. So could we see a sort of development in medical wearables, I guess you'd call them? Yes. One of the things that is discussed by experts is how if things become seamless, we're way more likely to track them. If things feel no effort to us to do. So I suppose as time moves on, everything will become even more simply and not noticeably embedded in our activities.

And as you suggest, maybe some of these devices will become more medical ones. So right now, most of our wearables are not medical devices, but there are some elements of them. I think maybe the heart rate sensor, I can't actually remember what the exact sensor is, but there is something that has medical approval. And so there are these elements that sit within them and there will probably become more as the technology becomes better. Because obviously that does help. That does help for many purposes if we start to use medical grade sensors.

Yeah, I've also heard about kind of implants that we can put inside somebody with a certain condition and then control them externally with an app and monitor them. And I think that's already being tested. Well, yes, and it's quite incredible what you can do. And Neurrelink was a fascinating example of this. Brain Computer interfaces are obviously a real extreme in terms of what you're talking about. But the first guy to ever have one put in, Noland Arbor, I interviewed him a while ago. And he was talking about how the device had been working fine. And then suddenly it wasn't. And obviously, you know, he really panicked. He had transformed his existence. And he wanted it back to its full functionality. It allows him

to just think something and see thought alone it controls a computer. Well, they managed to fix it through an update remotely. So this device is embedded in his brain and a software update could update it. So in the future, he hopes that it may start to be able to help him operate things around him because theoretically there's no reason it shouldn't work, albeit we've wanted to be safe, like a humanoid robot or his wheelchair. And those things could be done via an update that would then, make this device already in his brain do these things?

So you mentioned robots there. I think this is another really interesting area in medicine, with specifically robot surgeons. Yeah. So what can we say about that? What's funny when you say robot surgeons, or I think when anyone mentions robots, is it conjures up this image of a humanoid.

That's the natural place that people go. But of course, most robotics are not humanoids. Certainly not in the case of robotic surgery. it's a machine that doesn't look anything like a human. And robots in healthcare in various different forms are certainly going to be a sign of the future. They're already being used in many ways. Robots can perform uniform surgery time and time again.

There are many benefits. They can be available in lots of different places. A robot can carry out other functions for testing, for example, in an environment where a human wouldn't want to be. During COVID, we saw this as well. and there are these robot pets that some people might have to help with dementia is one of the things they've been seen to help with this or robotic dog. So, robotics are interesting in the concept of healthcare, but I think it's important to not visualize them as humanoid. They come in many forms, but the humanoid form is probably not the most useful.

So we can't really talk about future tech these days without bringing on AI. Absolutely. So this has been already used for, I don't know, hundreds of different applications. So can you tell us some of the most sort of promising and effective ones? Well, yes. AI is not just one thing. And I suppose that's a good starting point here. AI is used in so many different ways.

It could be an extra pair of eyes for a radiologist looking at scans. So it helps augment the human by a third set of eyes looking at it, It's sometimes being able to see things a human can't. It can also act as a scribe for a doctor so the doctor can have the more human-focused experience, but the admin is then done by the machine. Or it may even be in analysing patterns in the face to assess and quantify depression. There are so many different ways that AI is coming into healthcare, and it can even be for efficiency.

So it's got lots of different uses. In some forms, it is large language models, but in many, it's completely other forms of AI. and its use is really broad. It's also not new. It's been around for quite a while. Everyone's just become a lot more interested in talking about it. So it's being used in many ways and it will increasingly be done so in many more. And it's giving us the most incredible power to be able to unearth findings between our genetic information, our lifestyle data, disease, really understanding risk.

The power of AI here is absolutely incredible. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in a

hi-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist's focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound. and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal-powered-by-name boutique. Visit focal-powered by-name.com for more information.

These days, a lot of people are complaining that they can't actually get an appointment with their GP. So could things like, I don't know, it's a bit old-fashioned now, but is the sort of future of telemedicine? Yes, telemedicine is still around. Telemedicine is not dead and is actually coming in different forms. I actually saw this one thing when I was at CES, the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas last year, and it was called a clinic in a pod. And it was like a little, well, sort of posh shed, where you went in and there was a video call with a doctor on it.

And the equipment you needed, that it was a camera, a stethoscope, came down from the ceiling. So they were available for you during your appointment. You stood on some scales. So it stepped up the idea of telemedicine to you would visit a place, but this pod could be placed anywhere. So in remote areas, it could bring access to more doctors without the doctors needing to physically be there. But it also provided some of that equipment that you would get in a healthcare setting. So there's many ideas as to how technology can do this. There's also various devices that you could use at home alongside a video call.

So I think telemedicine is also upping its game as technology is allowing it to. And that lack of access to appointments, we're seeing this as well in mental health, where AI mental health chatbots have really been gaining ground, albeit there are a lot of people who are actually using the large language models, not the ones that have safety and privacy built in at their core that are actually for that purpose. So there's definitely a future that involves telemedicine, involves greater access to appointments 24-7,

and definitely gives people better access than trying to get that precious appointment and that being their only option. So how about developing new drugs and new treatments? Because, you know, everybody's talking about things like antibiotic resistance and, you know, maybe new cancer drugs or Alzheimer's drugs. So where do we stand with that at this point? And what can we look forward to? Well, there is so much happening in this space. We often hear about AI drug discovery. What does that mean? Well, it means that drugs are tested computationally before being tested in a lab so that you narrow down the number that are likely to work. computer system can understand more about the target to develop the drugs that might hit it. It could even be repurposing old drugs. But as I was told when I was doing a panel once on drug discovery was that this is more than

finding a needle in a haystack. This is finding a needle in a field. It's a tough game. It's tough finding the right drugs. And AI is playing its part in many elements of the drug discovery development approval process. So, for example, even to get clinical trials off the ground quicker and we're with better candidates AI is being used. There are lots of ways that AI is playing into this.

And also, as we understand more about our microbiome, we understand more about our genetics, we'll start to understand more about what drugs will work for who and what side effects may occur elsewhere. And what that might mean is, there could be some drugs that have really serious side effects for some people, too many people, so they get taken off the market, which means a lot of people they wouldn't have caused that for,

can't have them. But once we start to understand better what works for who, so what not to give people as well, it could open the doors to more drugs and actually some more targeted drugs that cause fewer side effects for the people that are actually taking them. So how about things like prosthetics? Because we've made leaps and bounds in this over the last several, I guess, decades. I've seen recently this sort of exoskeleton that was made with somebody who was paralyzed and they were able to get their mobility back. Yeah, it's incredible. It's really incredible. And I've seen a couple of people use these exoskeletons. And I actually went to something called the Cybathlon, which was a competition, which both put the athletes, who were the people

using the assisted tech, and then the scientists behind it as well was sort of all in competition, creating some really amazing things and prosthetic hands. It was several years ago I went. And the haptic feedback in the hands, getting any sort of sense of touchback was something quite phenomenal that they were starting to work on. But the exoskeletons are quite something. And I've also seen them used in the able-bodied to supercharge them. It was actually in a Curry's warehouse that I went where people were wearing them who were lifting boxes. And it gave them 30 kilograms of extra strength. I mean, I tested it and I thought the idea of carrying boxes around for eight hours must have been so strenuous for anybody, having felt quite exhausted after doing it just

for the time of filming. So obviously, you don't want to see people being given longer shifts, and I'm not suggesting this is happening. This is just theoretical. But you don't want to think, well, if you enhance the human, you can get the human to do more. We want to enhance the human so it's better for them. And they don't hurt their back. And they lift more ergonomically. And they get all the good out of it, not the bad. So another thing that's really exciting at the moment is lab-grown organs. So how does that work? And, you know, what current state are we in and what can we look forward to there? Okay, so this is a really interesting one because if we could grow organs in a lab, well, it would be an absolutely phenomenal advancement for transplants.

But right now, organs in a lab, these organoids, organs on a chip, all these different things we call them are used for testing. So they're not suitable to put into humans. Most of them, that is, there have actually been bladders that were developed quite a while ago and were put into humans and even seven years later, which was the follow-up, they were marking them by, they had been deemed a great success. So in some ways it may be possible, but obviously not all organs are equal. And we do seem to be a way away from actually being able to create in a lab, heart, lungs, any of these other organs to be able to replace them in a human. But there are many that are interested in trying to do so and are aiming in that direction. In the meantime, there are some

ideas around organ rejuvenation. There are other things happening in this space. Generally, the idea of being able to build that organ in a lab and put it into a human, we're not there yet for most organs. So another sort of big health concern at the moment is obviously cancer. But, you know, how close are we to that cure? What's the current research? When it comes to cancer, I think AI and technology holds incredible promise as to how it can transform things. The sad thing here is it's not going to be soon enough for many people. So there's an incredible story of hope. And that's for many reasons, but I do need to temper it with, unfortunately, it's going to

take time. So I think the first thing is we're going to understand a lot more about risk. So we know who to screen when. And this means we can find the onset of cancer a lot earlier, which means more delicate at treatment, we can even in many cases find pre-cancerous signs. So that effectively could mean prevention. When things are treated earlier, they stand a far better chance of being treated successfully. We know that particularly when it comes to cancer. And also, treatments are going to become more personalized as we understand more about the target. We understand more about

people's genetics. And we're also going to learn a lot more about recurrence risk. So we can decide on treatment better, knowing of the risk of recurrence. So I think with so many variables, so many different types of cancer, also looking at the idea of treating the genetics of the tumour rather than just the location of it, there are a lot of variables here that AI and the knowledge we're gaining is going to make an enormous difference to in the future throughout the entire cancer journey from that moment of screening, predicting, preventing, diagnosing treating, it's just not going to happen overnight. This is going to be incremental change.

And as those treatments can become more personalised, hopefully they will become far kinder. And this will all play into the idea of living a longer health span. So not just lifespan, but more healthy years of your life because it's not just about the time where you're suffering from illness, but it's often the after effects of treatment as well. So sort of tangentially to that, I suppose. So people often talk about the aging population. Yeah. And with that comes the sort of increased prevalence, I guess, at least sort of crudely, of degenerative brain disorders. So what can we say about that? What's going on in that field that's exciting? Yeah, there's a lot happening in the science of aging. If we can slow down aging, we would slow down the onset of a lot of disease, including dementia. Now, I wondered at one point whether it was the case if we all live long enough, we would all get dementia. But that's not the case. Scientists had had invented. investigated that and it's not. So the fact we're living to an older age is obviously causing us to be at

higher risk of a lot of conditions, including dementia and a lot more people to be at risk of those. So there's a great deal of research going into what we can do to push back dementia and push back other diseases of cognitive decline. And also the non-disease process, just our own natural cognitive decline. So some of the ideas are, well, in fact, I think right now life. is central to this. Let's work on the basis of lifestyle first because most experts you speak to no matter what amazing scientists they are, what they're doing, they come back to this idea of lifestyle. And we know how important that is for so many different conditions, for our overall health, what we can do through diet, eating well, sleeping well, but technology now gives us the ability

to track it and to quantify its effect on us. So we change our habits. We can see how it impacts us. And I think that's really important because it gives us real feedback on it. And that can be really motivating, but it can also help us understand what works and what doesn't. And some scientists are looking at this in cognitive decline and in the shrinkage of the brain that happens with age to see what's going on and predict the pattern going on within an individual's brain. So to do this, it would involve you having access to an fMRI scan. And obviously this is where it becomes not quite so widely available, albeit maybe these scans could become more available, the technology gets better, smaller machines can do more.

There are concepts like even Brian Johnson's device kernel that that may eventually be able to monitor the brain well enough that it could assess some of this. So there's technology heading in the direction where this sort of idea could become more practical, where you start to, on a regular basis, monitor the brain and the shrinkage, see the pattern, start to understand what's happening, make those lifestyle interventions, or possibly even drugs, when we get better preventative drugs for dementia, which are assumed to be coming, by the way, it is expected we are going to get breakthroughs in the not too distant future, then it might be possible to delay the onset of that disease to beyond life expectancy. So whilst it may not be able to be treated,

you just push it back far enough so it's not a problem. But you could have the susceptibility to it, but you could manage to keep on delaying its onset so it doesn't become a problem. certainly at symptomatic onset. Because there's a lot of work looking at long-term data from wearables, say, and whilst they're not medical devices, one example I was given was that there's the early research into the idea that maybe 20 to 30 years before the onset of symptomatic dementia,

you'd be able to see changes in the sleep pattern that would represent that was where you were heading. And I appreciate this could sound very scary for a lot of people, but it can also give you the chance to do something about it. And the more we learn about what you can do about it, the more that all becomes meaningful. So these days, whenever we talk about technology, there are some people that say, well, this is all well and good? But is there a risk that these technologies will only be available to the ultra-rich elite? Yes. And that's the question that I kept coming back to when I was interviewing people.

And it's the natural question to go to. There are also some positive answers that don't reinforce that, which I shall give you. but I think there is a chance that access to many things will get to the wealthiest first, and that is the way that things have often worked. And the aim here is that AI brings health equity. This is not about aiming to reinforce inequalities. That's not what anybody wants. That's not what anybody's aiming for.

It's to nobody's benefit, and it's not kind. So let's just sort of acknowledge the reality that exists first. But then let's actually also look at where this is going. two sides to this. There's the healthcare systems. In England, we know that women are spending 25% of their lives in poor health. For men, that's 20%. There's clearly an issue here. There's a gap that needs closing and that's in a country with a national health system. So if we look at what is actually being aimed at here, we are aiming to better healthcare for everyone to close that gap. That is the hope. That is the ambition. And a lot of what we're looking at,

A lot of this technology is stuff that gradually, and it's not going to happen overnight, will end up within healthcare systems and will end up being available to many people. So I know not everything can be, and there is a cost issue in the equation, but a lot of the benefit here will democratise better healthcare, better knowledge, even around the world, because AI is giving access to surgeons in remote parts of the world are able to liaise with the best surgeons in the world. in other parts, when doing surgery live, AI is tracking what they're doing. They've got whole systems in place to be able to bring better surgery to areas that wouldn't have otherwise had it available and where you don't have many surgeons and they're often having to do surgeries that aren't even their expertise. So AI is making a lot available, but yes, of course, there are challenges to bring it to everybody. There's also the other side of this, which is the individual tracking. The idea of what we can do to motivate ourselves, what we can do to

better our own health outcomes. And I've spoken to a few people who are working on trying to bring this to population level. They want to make sure it doesn't just remain the reserve of the elite. So some of these ideas include, for example, bringing biological aging tests, which is something that right now are not as useful as they will become. But if you think of a lateral flow test type test and if they were subsidised and people were able to assess their biological age, say every six months, and be given feedback on what they could do to better their health, this could be very motivating. And if these were made available, this was an example given to me by someone at Kings

who's working on this particular project. If they were made available for a few pounds at a supermarket and you were then getting a voucher that you then got their money back off your shopping, the reason you would pay at all is because of the adherence to the test, it would encourage people to do them. Then this is a way of bringing something that is cheap to produce, provides information and motivation and gives people a picture of their health, people who may well not have been thinking about it, that sort of access. There's also various ways of subsidising trackers.

Trackers don't have to be expensive. There's a huge scale of what trackers there are. And also, the data that will be gained from those who are testing everything will actually provide findings that will benefit all. So we've just got to find sensible and safe ways of bringing benefit to all. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Lara Lewington. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her latest book, Hacking Humanity, How Technology Can Save Your Health and Your Life.

If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then please also check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital source. or poor signal.

Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at nameadio.com.

Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes, so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order.

Ralph's, fresh for everyone.