Science Editor of The Times, Tom Whipple, talks post-Covid scientific innovation, geroprotection, and greenwashing
We met with The Science Editor of The Times, to find out what excites him in the future of medicine. He tells us he’d like to live forever.
📷: Jay Brooks / The Times Magazine / News Licensing
They say great things never came from comfort zones and Tom thinks that’s true in the case of Covid. “I like to think of it a bit like the second world war” says Tom, “generally not considered a good thing, but out of it came rockets, computers, nuclear power and jet planes. All because of massive investment in science”. The same happened during the pandemic. Since December 2019, the number of Covid-19 papers published has toppled 1 millionᶦ - granted not all high quality research - but this explosion of scientific research and collaboration could make all the difference to the evolution of healthcare in the future.
For instance, “we hadn’t got a single mRNA therapeutic before Covid”. mRNA vaccines were originally developed by BioNTech to treat cancer.ᶦᶦ To trigger an immune response, traditional vaccines inject a weakened or inactivated germ into our bodies; mRNA vaccines, on the other hand, introduce RNA (mRNA)ᶦᶦ, teaching our cells how to make a specific protein that will trigger an immune response inside our bodies.
Advances like these bring hope for a new era of cancer treatment, where patients will receive personalised vaccines to teach their body how to destroy tumours. For example, there is now an mRNA vaccine treatment in the pipeline that is tailored to each individual’s cancer and has produced promising results in a small initial trial in pancreatic cancer – a notoriously difficult cancer to treat. Thanks to Covid, mRNA technology has moved forward at least five years and Tom thinks “it’s going to be quite a big thing”.
Specificity is key. There is a wider movement in science from one-size fits all, to a more personalised approach – the so called ‘paradigm shift’. With the completion of the Human genome project, researchers have a set of tools to make it possible to find the genetic contributions to common diseases, identifying genomic variants associated with complex disease by comparing the genomes of individuals with and without those diseases. This information is then analysed by super computers to estimate how the collection of a person’s variants affect their risk of a certain diseases.
In the future, this will enable HCPs to tailor prevention programs to each person’s unique genetic makeup. “It’s exciting”, but do we have the technology to support this? The UK is a world leader both in providing cell and gene therapies to patients and developing them, but there are challenges. Despite growing investment in this sector, skill gaps have resulted in a bottleneck preventing potentially revolutionary treatments from reaching patients who need them, and accessibility will be key to reducing global disparities.
It’s not all doom and gloom though, according to Tom. “Although global equity concerns remain, I’m not as pessimistic as some that personalised medicine is only going to help people in richer countries”. He believes “linking data together could prove really important”. By 2045, it’s thought we will have developed a health infrastructure based on deep-longitudinal multimodal human data, making it easier to track and, importantly, treat diseases globally.ᶦᶦᶦ
You could say a clear motivation for the continual development of technology is obvious – to extend or maintain a healthy human lifespan. Human life expectancy has increased over the past 170 years in many parts of the world,ᶦᶦᶦ unfortunately, the healthy lifespan has not. Tom recently reported “we’re in for a longer life, just don’t expect a better one”. AKA, we will all live longer but most of these extra years will be ‘unhealthy’ – no thank you?
“It’s natural for most people to say “no thank you” when asked if they’d like to live well into their 100s, but not Tom, who thinks it would be quite cool”
Don’t panic. Make way for the rise of the ‘gero-protective’ or human made therapies targeting the underlying molecular mechanisms of ageing. Are we cheating nature? Not according to Tom. It’s natural for most people to say “no thank you” when asked if they’d like to live well into their 100s, but not Tom, who thinks it would be quite cool “ I’d like to live forever”. “A lot of effort in medicine goes into the last few years of life, disproportionately so. Real life expectancy gains have come from sanitation, exercise, and quitting smoking, rather than a wiz bang prostate cancer therapy. If we can find an equivalent to sanitation and stopping smoking, in here’s this drug that gets rid of senescent cells then we’d probably end up saving a lot of money”.
Well, we may not be living longer healthier lives just yet, but by 2050 the population of the world is expected to be 9 billion! It’s now well-acknowledged that health and climate change are part and parcel. As a journalist writing the first draft of history, Tom feels responsible for communicating climate change. “It’s ongoing, it’s there in the background, you can’t ignore it.”. The World Health Organization (WHO) has said that between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approx. 250,000 additional deaths per year, and an increasingly inhospitable planet will exacerbate existing conditions and create new ones.
The IPPC concluded that to avert catastrophic health impacts and prevent millions of climate related deaths, the world must limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. But are the public taking heed of these warnings? Tom thinks so. “Naively, I thought there would be a moment where people said ‘we’re all idiots’. But unfortunately, that’s not how human nature works”. In the latest COP talks, “we’ve gone from the worst-case scenario being 6 degrees, to the reasonable worst case scenario being 2.4 degrees - if everyone fulfills the pledges they say they are going to fulfill”. “The world is getting there, and the world is going to get there despite having people continually shouting nonsense, probably without the satisfying moment where someone can say, look the polar bears are dead”.
People are often surprised to hear the carbon footprint of the pharma industry is higher than the automotive industry.ᶦᵛ Tom says “that’s something I hadn’t thought about and sure a lot of people haven’t”. Products manufactured by big pharma companies are obviously critical for population health. However, they are no longer getting a free pass when it comes to climate change.
At the first climate conference Tom attended, “there was a feeling the government was trying to drag along businesses to do the right things, and now there’s a feeling that businesses are dragging along governments”
Everyone is shifting as far as they can towards carbon neutrality. But does it mean anything? “Companies have recognised that this is going to happen. We’ve signaled that by 2050 this needs to happen, and we’re looking at ways to make this happen, and companies are trying to steal commercial advantage by doing so”. “It’s good that companies want to greenwash! That is a positive sign! If you recognise that this is why is good for PR then that’s a big step, and if you can also make it substanted – great”
“Hopefully, we’ll all bring each other along” says Tom. The future won’t just come from the exploration of bench scientists or the emergence of new technologies, but from forging a new era of corporate social responsibility that re-evaluates our relationship with nature, and ensures the sustainable development of health systems that will deliver them.
ᶦ. Dimensions (2022). Covid-19 Report: Publications, Clinical Trials, Funding. Available at: https://reports.dimensions.ai/covid-19/. Accessed: 28.06.22
ᶦᶦ. May. M (2021). After COVID-19 successes, researchers push to develop mRNA vaccines for other diseases. Nature. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01393-8. Accessed: 28.06.22
ᶦᶦᶦ. Nat Med. (2019) Looking forward 25 years: the future of medicine. Nat Med. 25(12): 1804-180. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095888/. Accessed. 28.06.22
ᶦᵛ. Belkhir. L. & Elmeligi. A. (2019) Carbon footprint of the global pharmaceutical industry and relative impact of its major players. Elsevier. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652618336084. Accessed 28.06.22S
