I had a ton of fun recently doing a live comedy show on immortality with Dan Toomey at Good Work. See a clip here, then follow the link to the full 45-min video on Good Work's patreon.

A beautiful profile of our work on intrinsic health, by David Craig at Columbia News. magazine.columbia.edu/article/secr...

1/4 Scientific theories make testable predictions. Our intrinsic health framework hypothesizes that energy, communication, and structure are sufficiently integrated that a common health construct can be reliably measured. 🧵

Peer review is breaking down. As an editor, it's nearly impossible to find reviewers. Editors end up needing to review articles themelves, outside their field. A flood of dubious-quality research is overwhelming the system.

1/5 What if aging isn't primarily about damage accumulation, but the declining capacity of your body's integrated health field? Our research introduces 'intrinsic health'—potentially revolutionizing how we understand and measure biological aging. #LongevityScience 🧵

The Future of Aging Science 1/ 🚀 Breaking: The hallmarks of aging aren't as universal as we thought. Our 4-population study shows aging biology is far more flexible and context-dependent than textbooks suggest. 🧵

The WEIRD Problem 1/ 🧵 Most aging research comes from WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). Our new paper shows this creates massive blind spots in understanding human aging.

NEW PAPER: What if "inflammaging" isn't universal? Our new study shows Indigenous nonindustrialized populations with high infections but low chronic disease defy industrialized aging patterns. The hallmarks of aging might vary by environment and lifestyle. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

The 'disease-first' approach to medicine is like having mechanics who only know how to fix broken parts, but don't understand how the whole car works. Our new 'intrinsic health' framework changes that. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceOfHealth #SystemsThinking

1/4 The Paradigm Shift: For too long, medicine has defined health as "not sick." Our new paper in Science Advances proposes a revolutionary approach: "intrinsic health" as a measurable biological state that emerges from energy, communication & structure in our bodies. Read more…🧵

Complex systems theory meets evolutionary biology in our new paper on 'intrinsic health.' We propose a first-principles approach to understanding health as an emergent property with measurable dynamics. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Medicine treats your body like separate departments in a company. But what if it actually works more like a jazz ensemble—where harmony emerges from constant communication? Our new 'Science of Health' framework explains this revolutionary view. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What if our traditional approach to health has been backward? Instead of cataloging diseases, we should measure the unified biological state that underpins the resilience, performance & sustainability of our bodies. Our new framework: #IntrinsicHealth Article: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1/5 JUST PUBLISHED: Our team has developed a first-principles framework for the #ScienceOfHealth based on complex systems & evolutionary biology. Here's why it matters... 🧵

We intuitively know when we're healthy, yet science struggles to measure it. Our new paper bridges this gap by defining 'intrinsic health' as an emergent property of our biology. This could transform medicine & public health. #ParadigmShift www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

One protein, two opposing roles: This ‘compelling’ study shows how the same signalling molecule can drive either protrusion or retraction in migrating cells depending on its concentration and activation dynamics. buff.ly/pMGXJVM

Whatever you think about RFK, this is unqualified good news. Not yet clear how big the health benefits will be, but more than nothing! www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/b...

Amazing new research from Diego Bassani: We can map networks of communities to see how ideas, diseases, and many other things spread. This produces a crucial new tool, SEEDNet, for public health research. So cool!

Too much competition in science leads to worse science: we over-optimize the metrics of success (publications, funding, etc.) at the expense of actual good science. It's Goodhart's law (see this post I wrote years ago before I heard of Goodhart): maketheworldworkbetter.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/w...

Meet our member Christine Kuryla, a Ph.D. student using wearable data to tap into complex systems and take personal health tracking to the next level.

Meet our member Dr. Berhane, a leading expert in longitudinal and trajectory modeling, uncovering how complex, evolving data patterns shape long-term health outcomes.

Meet our member Dr. Liu, a biostatistician at Peking University pioneering federated models to reveal how whole-proteome dynamics shift under stress in both health and disease.

There is a citation penalty for researchers who pivot fields, a(nother) clear example of Goodheart's Law. Over-structuring science and the competition that drives it often does more harm than good. We need to reduce competition to achieve more. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Distinguishing correct from incorrect facts could be a problem for AI, but also for normal people. One of our biggest challenges as scientists is right-dosing our skepticism. Too little and we buy into nonsense. Too much and we are paralyzed.

Meet our member Dr. Sen Pei @senpei.bsky.social, an applied mathematician and complexity science expert exploring how networks of biological signals shape infectious disease dynamics—and how their interplay can support or disrupt health.

Meet our member Dr. Jeff Goldsmith, developing data science methods for wearable device data to study how physical activity affects health across the life course.

Aging accelerates later in life. Great new work from Arun Balanchandran, @danbelsky.bsky.social‬, and colleagues extending the measure of Pace of Aging. Just out in Nature Aging. nature.com/articles/s43...

The science behind blood tests for Alzheimer's has been advancing rapidly in recent years. This is real and exciting. However, still no great treatment or prevention options. And defining Alzheimer's clearly is a challenge.

Meet our member Dr. Malinsky, a biostatistician blending the mathematics of causality with philosophy to unravel the complex networks behind health and disease, and what truly causes what.

Shout out to this beautiful piece by Dr. Martin Picard. Tracing mitochondria from the evolution of multicellularity to social beings to drivers of human health and well-being! Quite a journey, read it all! www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...

As if we needed another reason to know that sleep is good... The challenge is doing it! We need to start listening to our bodies again, and stop subjecting them to the rhythms of our crazy lives.

Meet our member Dr. Makarem, an epidemiologist specializing in cardiovascular health, exploring how lifestyle medicine, especially sleep, can prevent heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes.

Another example of how we need to be humble as scientists, not thinking we know everything or that one experiment can be definitive.

Meet our member Dr. Ying Wei, a biostatistician leveraging AI-driven inference and quantile regression to analyze complex health data, uncovering subtle patterns that drive new insights into health outcomes.

MDVs, yet another example of a new layer of biological information and mitochondrial complexity. Mitochondria are not just powerhouses, they have many roles, and many relate to information and communication. www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/14...

This graph shows how cost-inefficient US health care is. But it also shows (really interesting!) that if trends in other countries are extrapolated toward an asymptote, there's actually a fair amount of gain still to be had by smart spending on health! What is that smart spending then? 🤔

1/n Haven't read this book yet, but looking forward to it! The NY Times summary highlights many key points: @erictopol.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/w...

Longevity’s true secrets might not lie in biology. True well-being begins with fostering vibrant communities and adopting healthy lifestyles. By transforming how we live and interact, we can unlock a more profound and lasting vitality. ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/...

While this is cool work, the last thing we need is more ways to fake giving ourselves a sugar fix. Rather, we need to train ourselves away from sugar addiction and other societal and technological shortcuts to dopamine.

Fascinating correlation on how exercise is linked to lower amyloid levels in the brain — reinforcing its role in cognitive health.

One of the impacts of federal funding cuts to health research: broken trust between researchers and the communities they're trying to help. If you care about getting toxins out of our lives, this is a big deal. www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/grant-t...

Interesting new research exploring evolutionary capture and the molecular pathways that may underlie the trade-off between reproduction and aging. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Science has become driven by conformity, and funding mechanisms prioritize what is conservative, not audacious. Bold science can't happen without bolder funders! We need to rethink project-based research funding.

A protein that disrupts cells’ energy centers may be a culprit in chronic fatigue syndrome Study offers clues as to how exhaustion could arise in people with ME/CFS—and potentially related conditions such as Long Covid www.science.org/content/arti... #PEM

Hear me discuss our new paper written with the inimitable Laurent Hébert-Dufresne and colleagues! @lhd.bsky.social #Complexity #Physiology #Governance www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Meet Dr. Julie Herbstman, director of Columbia’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health, leading bold, transformative strides in public health research and policy.

Fascinating new study in PLOS Comp Biol uses foot traffic data to model neighborhood-level COVID spread in NYC—check it out!

Excited to launch our new series: Join Dr. Cohen as he breaks down the fundamentals of health science in our first episode—making complex biology simple, one concept at a time.

Transposons are not just genomic noise, under stress they are nature's emergency switch and McClintock knew it.

Biofilms don’t just grow—they engineer. Change their menu, and they whip up bizarre, beautiful new worlds like tiny, unstoppable designers!