All posts by Julia James

When angel investor Esther Dyson was in Russia, training for a private space flight, she was struck by how rigorously we track the health of astronauts. In the earthbound world, of course, it’s only sick among us who accrue detailed medical records.

“I came back, and I thought: Let’s genoytpe all the astronauts,” recalls Dyson, who sits on the board of the Silicon Valley personal genomics company 23andMe. Exploring the genetic makeup of an unusually healthy population seemed like an irresistible research opportunity. Continue Reading →

Harvard administrators said early this month that they would, despite a $32 billion endowment, be looking at ways to cut operating costs. One expense on the chopping block: university subscriptions to academic journals. Annual fees for publications like The Journal of Comparative Neurology can reach as high as $29,113, the public radio show Marketplace reports. Continue Reading →

Healthcare innovation presents an obvious challenge: It requires highly specialized knowledge across a range of disciplines. Most often, that knowledge must be independently sourced – because doctors are good at being doctors, and entrepreneurs are good at being entrepreneurs. Nate Gross is an exception to that paradigm. Equally fluent in the languages of medicine and business (he holds an MD from Emory and an MBA from Harvard), he’s cofounded two digital health startups: Doximity, a social network for physicians, and Rock Health, which helps grow other digital health startups. In the latter capacity, he’s helped around 40 teams of Bay Area innovators.

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In 1979, human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin took an unwieldy and esoteric piece of information technology – one that seemed to be the exclusive domain of guys sporting suspenders and beards – and began re-imagining it as a true consumer appliance.

Now Raskin’s son, Aza, is working to bring the same interface design revolution to health and wellness. He co-founded Massive Health in 2010 and promised “beautiful products” that would sit in users’ pockets and give them “deep insight” into their own health-determining behaviors.

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