Alex Wiltschko

So, again, I think it's good to go back to an analogy and think about a time when doctors didn't know that looking at the molecules inside of blood was valuable because that was true 100 years ago, maybe even to the 40s.

I've got a bunch of blood, whatever, right?

Like, I don't know if there's anything interesting in it.

Blood is blood, yeah.

Exactly.

It's like, oh, you've got too much blood.

Get rid of it.

So there was a study that was run, a very profound study called the Framingham Heart Study, and it's named after the town of Framingham, Massachusetts.

And what they did-

is they looked at heart disease of basically everybody in the town.

They just tracked and measured the things that they knew at the time were indicative of heart disease.

And then they did a smart thing, which is they just collected as much data as they could, even if they didn't know what to do with it at the time.

One of those things was they took blood samples and they froze them.

And when they went back much later and they looked at that blood and they knew who had heart disease, who didn't have heart disease, they found a few things over time.

They found that this thing called cholesterol wasn't actually that great for your heart.

In fact, a subtype of cholesterol was the worst.

And they found that there is this molecule, you know, this class of molecules called statins that actually were really good for preventing heart disease.

And they found a whole host of other things.

It's called bioprospecting.

People still do it today.