Keeping score. Seeking a grand equation for health with theoretical physicist, Laurence Jacobs, PhD.

All right, welcome back. If you're still around in the year 2061, two things will be true. You'll enjoy seeing the next passing of Halley's Comet, and your life insurance company will enjoy having collected four more decades of your life insurance premiums, without a payout. Standing there that day you and your insurance company can be grateful for the work of one man, the exact same man that comet is named for. The English astronomer, mathematician and physicist, Edmond Halley. Why you ask? Well, not only did Halley develop the calculations to predict the comet's periodicity, he is also developed the early mathematical tools for predicting human longevity, known very well to your insurance company as actuarial science.

Today's guest, like Halley is also a physicist, a theoretical physicist to be exact. And like Halley he sees no need to limit his research interests to one academic domain. Laurence Jacobs began is career at MIT pursuing some of the broader mysteries of our universe. Today he's pursuing another ambitious project, quantifying all of the measures, signs, risk models, data sets, bio-wearable monitoring outputs, health history, genomics and more into (perhaps) one single accessible number. Something you may have heard called a health score. Something that promises to refine our ability to predict longevity, and even improve it.

This was an amazing conversation and not a short one. The potential benefits of developing these tools are huge, but so are the challenges and dizzying complexities. Many of the answers will likely come from surprising and unexpected places. To quote one of our past guests, Dr. Robert Gale, the American physician at Chernobyl, “Progress is often made by those who investigate the boundaries of several areas, instead of having laser-like focus on a single discipline. That’s where many of the answers in science reside.”

That's exactly where we find Laurence Jacobs today, in Zurich Switzerland where he continues to develop the main concepts and the risk models that underlie the Dacadoo Health Score and the remote disease monitoring and management system, remsmed / EMMA Care.

With that said, let's get started..