Most supplements don’t fail in the bottle. According to Juvenon chief scientific officer Dr. Luke Bucci, they fail because people quit long before their biology has time to respond.

Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Dr. Luke Bucci, chief scientific officer at Juvenon, the longevity supplement company founded by Dr. Bruce Ames, to look back on four decades inside the supplement industry. Bucci explains how acetyl-L-carnitine carries fuel into the mitochondria, and how alpha-lipoic acid helps drive ATP production while soaking up the oxidative “sparks” that come with it. He names the three supplements he thinks everyone needs (vitamin D3, omega-3s and magnesium), and he argues for krill oil over fish oil based on how omega-3 phospholipids get into cell membranes. That leaves a hard question: can a market built on instant gratification support products that take weeks or months to show results?

Luke Bucci, PhD, is chief scientific officer at Juvenon and a former expert advisor on supplements to the United States Olympic Committee. Website: https://juvenon.com

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What happens when your polygenic risk score says one thing and your body says another? Broad Institute geneticist Dr. Nikolas Baya studies the people who don't match their genetic prediction, and the rare variants that often explain the gap.

Dr. Jeremy Koenig talks with Dr. Nikolas Baya, a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute, about his recently published UK Biobank study showing that people who deviate from their polygenic score are enriched for rare variants in genes linked to rare disease. Nik explains why that makes polygenic scores useful as a filter for rare disease diagnosis, how protective variants in genes like PCSK9 have led to new drug targets, and why an estimated 240 million people worldwide live with a rare genetic disease. He also walks through the BRaVa browser, a free tool for the Biobank Rare Variant Analysis consortium that pools rare variant results across ancestrally diverse biobanks, which he built with Claude Code in about two weeks. And he explains why he still writes by hand, comparing heavy AI use to eating cake: you feel full and productive, but it isn't intellectually nourishing.

Dr. Nikolas Baya is a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, with a DPhil from the University of Oxford's Genomic Medicine and Statistics program.

Connect with Nik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolas-baya/

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Engineer Mark Talbot was tracking his weight, food, steps, and sleep across five apps when his weight loss stalled, and none of them could tell him why. One question to AI about a year of his own Apple Health data gave him the answer. It also pointed to a bigger gap: doctors never see what happens between visits.

Dr. Jeremy Koenig talks with Mark Talbot, co-founder of Lifecycle Health, a platform that brings patients' wearable data into specialist practices. After going from about 5,000 to 12,000 daily steps and losing five to seven pounds in under a month, Talbot shared the idea on LinkedIn and heard from more than 80 people in under 10 days, including cardiologists, menopause specialists, and weight loss clinics. He explains how a practice can go live in about 10 minutes, how each patient is flagged red, amber, or green against their own baseline, and how cardiologists can watch blood pressure readings come in after a heart attack instead of waiting for the next appointment. They also discuss an early pattern from a small informal group of women wearing Oura or WHOOP, where skin temperature rose a few minutes before a hot flash, and ask whether longitudinal health data could replace "How have you been?" at every GP visit.

Mark Talbot is co-founder of Lifecycle Health and a former mainframe systems programmer whose career runs through British Airways, IBM, and two decades building software partnerships.

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