Xconomist of the Week: Larry Smarr’s Quest for ‘Quantified Health’

much easier for the average citizen to afford to track their key blood markers. It may well be that we see commercial startups arise that provide Internet consulting services on the type of questions you could ask your doctor given your blood screen results. Right now, many of my blood and stool tests are done through www.yourfuturehealth.com. I take my own stool samples and FedEx them in to a lab, then get the results over the Internet. The key is to track multiple markers and to combine the results in order to create a synthetic view of the functioning of your biochemical systems.

X: There is so much conflicting information online. How can ordinary people tell the difference between good healthcare advice and bad healthcare advice?

LS: This is certainly a real problem. However, like everything on the Web, branding is one of the solutions. When I want authoritative advice about medical issues I go to the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, or the National Institutes of Medicine web sites. That gives me enough general knowledge that I am prepared to meet with my doctors and ask intelligent questions.

X: We seem to be moving into an era in which connectivity is everywhere and computing power is infinite. These are the technologies that help to make the “quantified self” possible, right? But how infinite can these IT resources really be?

LS: Right now there are probably 10 million processors in the Internet “clouds” of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple. My guess is that this will grow at least 100-fold in the next decade. In comparison the fastest supercomputer in the world today has only about a half-million processors. Also there are vast amounts of storage space co-located with the computing.

X: Can you recommend any readings in this area?

The Program: The Brain-Smart Approach to the Healthiest You by Kelly Traver and Betty Kelly Sargent

Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan

Superhealth by Steven Pratt, M.D.

The Anti-Aging Zone by Barry Sears

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.