Reach 120, disease-free
Richard Barker is refreshingly not an immortalist. Sitting with Marek on the grass in London, he set out a goal that is both modest and enormous: “I’d be very happy if the majority of the world’s population can live to 120 without chronic disease.” That is the whole ambition of Prevention — the Bridge: not defeating death, but pushing disease decades down the road for as many people as possible.
He is honest about how far the science still has to go. We don’t yet understand the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s or dementia; cardiovascular disease is still the world’s largest killer; and inflammation — a tremendously important driver throughout the body — is something we’re only learning to modulate. Humility, not hype.
His optimism is about timing. We can increasingly anticipate and detect disease very early — and if liquid-biopsy tests become accurate enough without drowning the system in false positives, we can act before it takes hold. But you have to start early: “we’d have to start with people in their thirties,” before the arterial plaque is ever laid down.
And he builds the tools. Deep in cardiometabolic care, he runs an AI company that helps doctors work out who has high lipids or high blood pressure — and, crucially, in patients with more than one condition, what to treat first. Prevention, precision and AI, aimed squarely at the diseases that steal the last decades of life.
