The operating software
Wei-Wu He is the CEO of Human Longevity (HLI) in San Diego — a precision-medicine longevity clinic that reads your whole genome and images your whole body to find disease long before symptoms appear. It sits squarely on the Bridge of Prevention: the whole point is to catch what’s coming while it can still be changed. (It’s one of the four clinics in our Clinics directory, too.)
His interest in longevity is lifelong, and painfully personal. Growing up in China, he was six or seven when his grandmother was diagnosed with late-stage cervical cancer — from diagnosis to death was about two months. That early loss shaped a life. He studied biochemistry under a professor who lived to 110, and who encouraged him to come to the US for his PhD (Baylor, Mayo Clinic, Mass General).
Then, in 1993, a turning point: he met Craig Venter, who recruited him to help start Human Genome Sciences — the first large-scale DNA-sequencing company on Earth. Decades later, when Venter founded Human Longevity, Wei-Wu joined as an investor and board member, and eventually took the helm as CEO.
His conviction is simple and vast: “We have finally decoded our genome — the operating software of the human body.” Longevity, to him, is now a data-driven science. Read the code, measure the body, and you can move medicine from reacting to disease toward preventing it. We interviewed his daughter, Christine, on the same visit — a father and a daughter, both in the mission.
