The Future Of Immune Health Might Be Here

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

David Ewing Duncan has spent the last 25 years being poked and prodded in the name of science. He’s signed up for hundreds of tests because, as a journalist, he writes about emerging health breakthroughs. He says one recent test contains more useful data than anything he’s seen to date. He talks to host Emily Kwong about his score on the Immune Health Metric, which was developed by immunologist John Tsang. Together, David and John explain why immune health is so central to overall health and how a simple blood test could one day predict disease before it starts.

Learn more about the Human Immunome Project.

Read David’s full article about his experience with the Immune Health Metric. The piece is a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Aventine, a non-profit research foundation that creates and supports content about how technology and science are changing the way we live.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
0:05.4	RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right.
0:12.1	Learn more at RWJF.org.
0:15.6	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:21.4	David Ewing Duncan describes himself as the experimental man.
0:26.9	25 years ago, I was one of the first humans to have my DNA sequenced for a story for
0:32.6	Wired Magazine.
0:33.8	David is a journalist and a science writer.
0:36.1	And we almost didn't do the story.
0:37.8	It seemed a bit gimmicky, but we did it, and it really resonated with people.
0:42.3	And so I was kind of off and running.
0:44.3	And he has made a career out of this, out of signing up for tests, promising new insights into health and mortality.
0:51.3	After sequencing his genome, he later tested his proteome, the protein circulating in his blood,
0:56.8	then his microbiome, then his metabolome.
0:59.4	And I've got about, I don't know, at last count about 70 terabytes of data myself,
1:04.1	which is an extraordinary amount of data.
1:05.8	A lot of that is I got a lot of MRI scans, so that eats up a lot of bites.
1:11.2	It is really a twist on the line in Hamlet, know thyself.
1:15.0	Yes.
1:15.9	But in all these terabytes of data?
1:17.9	Maybe 98% was not useful.
1:21.9	But the 2% this man, John Sang, is largely responsible for.
	...

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