The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

what time of day is ideal for you to be outside or to break a sweat; whether or not you can benefit from any particular medications without side effects; why you wake up routinely at 3:10 a.m. and how to stop that cycle; which songs synchronize with your heart rate; when to go for a walk or otherwise engage in a stress-reducing activity because it’s the time of day when your stress levels peak; and how much you should be worried about your levels of inflammation. You’ll be able to leverage associations made by virtue of aggregate data sets.
    So if you’re a thirty-six-year-old female who played soccer in your youth but smoked until you were thirty, you’ll be able to compare your health profile with others who’ve engaged in similar behaviors. And not only will your DNA be part of your data, but also the dynamic conversations that are taking place in your body that can be detected through a variety of measurements, from basic hormones that fluctuate through the day to the proteins found in your blood that follow a pattern and may, for instance, indicate a heightened risk for X or the need to treat Y .
    Proteomics, the study of the body’s proteins, is a rapidly expanding new field at the center of some of the research I’m conducting. We’re exploring how proteins compose the body’s language, and ultimately shape the language of health. Proteomics allows us to eavesdrop on that cellular conversation, which can inform better ways to prevent and treat disorders and diseases. Unlike your relatively static DNA, your proteins are incredibly dynamic. They change minute by minute in your body depending on what’s going on internally. I can’t tell from sequencing your DNA if you’ve just had a cocktail, what kind of foods you like to eat, when you last flexed some serious muscle, how well you slept last night, or if you are under a lot of stress. But your proteins, on the other hand, can tell. They can speak on your body’s behalf, divulging information that’s hard to find elsewhere. Through proteomics, I can start to look at and measure the “state” of your body. And it’s thatthirty-thousand-foot view that allows me to take in the whole picture, at a moment in time. DNA, while powerful and revelatory in its own right, cannot do this.
    Some of the other exciting research I’m involved with entails overlaying health records from millions of people with variables such as the weather and news events. Think about examining, for example, what happens to kids who were born during the week Hurricane Sandy swept over the eastern seaboard of the United States. That one environmental impact alone could have had health consequences.
    Stephen J. Elledge is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. His research is leading to tools for tracking patterns of disease in different populations. His work is ultimately helping us to understand the differences between the young and the elderly, as well as people from various parts of the world. A test he’s recently developed, for example, could be used to find out whether viruses, or the body’s immune response to them, have a hand in chronic diseases, including cancer. This test, called VirScan, requires just a drop of blood and can broadcast nearly every virus a person has been exposed to throughout life, past and present. First reported about in the journal Science in 2015, VirScan can currently identify more than a thousand strains of viruses from 206 species, which reflects the entire human “virome,” or all the viruses known to infect humans, from the common cold to HIV. 1 The test works by detecting antibodies, which are the body’s defense mechanisms against an invader. These are highly specific proteins the immune system manufactures to combat germs such as viruses. And once you are exposed to a virus and make an immune response to it, the antibodies stay around and provide a “record” that you were exposed