The Seed Fund will research and identify companies run by effective, intelligent people that are tackling difficult problems associated with the potential to greatly improve human health. This is why.

What’s Happening

In the entire recorded history, human health has improved constantly in a consistent manner. For example, in most developed nations, every decade that passes has added roughly two years to the average person’s life expectancy. So if life expectancy was 70 in 1990, you would expect it to have reached 72 by 2000. 

This remarkable, admirable achievement has suddenly plateaued or even fallen in much of the ‘developed’ world. Starting in about 2010 – 2011, this achievement that had continued for over a hundred years faltered. For example, even before the COVID pandemic, the UK had started to see declining life expectancy.

If we are living less long, perhaps we are healthier or happier while we do live? Unfortunately, neither seems to be the case. In the UK, half the population have a chronic disease, and a quarter of children have a chronic disease. This represents a steep increase over the last 50 years, and projections project the trend to continue to increase. 

Mental Illness likewise seems to be increasing.  A large-scale report of the UK paints a picture of general decline of mental health across generations. Among teenagers from 17-19, approximately 70% more children had a mental illness comparing 2017 to 2022. 

Difficult to understand changes are happening too. Infertility rates in the developed world (including the UK), have sharply increased over the last 60 years and testosterone is both bizarrely low and falling.

Under almost any metric, human health is failing to improve and in many cases getting worse. This is happening at a time when healthcare systems are becoming more expensive and more under pressure, from pandemics, aging populations, increasing cost bases and worsening chronic health systems.

Why is this? Why are we/you so sick, fat and lazy?

Why is this happening?

Human health either progresses or declines as influenced by two competing forces.

1. Change in the environment of the human: toxins, radiation, drugs, food quality, stress reduce the quality of human health.
2. Change in quality of healthcare: mainly but not exclusively the conventional healthcare and medical research institutions.

If there is a stall out in human health progression, it is due to one or both of the factors above. Let us briefly examine both topics. 

Changes in Environment 

In December of 1952, the smog over London hit an all time low. Pollution was so bad that in the whole of London, you could only see a few feet in front of you. Is it not obvious that the environment has improved dramatically for humans?

The smog of London refers to an environment with low personal controllability – that is, an environmental change that most individuals do not impact greatly through their actions. For example, if you lived in London at this period, you would have inhaled the smoke regardless of any actions you took to prevent it. There are some environmental factors with high personal controllability – that is, smoking of cigarettes, drinking alcohol, other drug use or choices of which products to purchase. 

In terms of the low personal controllability, clearly in some ways the environment is better and in some ways it is worse. In modern society, people face a host of emerging stressors that didn’t exist a few decades ago. On the lifestyle front, the ubiquity of screens, the impact of social media, and the increase in sedentary (sitting-based) jobs all contribute to new forms of mental and physical strain. At the same time, significant changes in our food and water supply—from the widespread use of antibiotics in agriculture, to the presence of microplastics in fish and seafood, to soil depletion affecting crop nutrition—have introduced additional layers of worry. Chemicals like PFAS (“forever chemicals”) can be found in food packaging and water sources, while ultra processed foods and rising pesticide residues further complicate efforts to eat healthily. Added to these are concerns such as heavy metals in fish, contamination from industrial pollutants, and the general uncertainty of water quality in many regions. While there is generally an increase in the quality of human environments, it is difficult to ascertain if any of these negative changes are having significant effects on human health. 

In terms of high personal controllability, there are many clear factors which individuals have some level of control over. 

For example, the CDC points to the following risk factors:

1. Smoking
2. Poor Nutrition
3. Lack of Physical Activity
4. Excessive Alcohol Use

It is not obvious that these are an important determinant of the changes in health levels on a population level. For example, rates of smoking continues to decline, as does alcohol. While these factors definitively affect the life expectancy of humans, you would need a complex statistical argument to show that life expectancy decreases are a lagging outcome of a previous increase in smoking and drug use. 

Therefore, while there are some clear areas of the environment which have become worse – it is also clear many areas have improved. 

Quality of Healthcare Institutions 

Scientific Institutions

Every year newspapers publish about the breathtaking advances in medical progress. There is, however, a strange way in which there has been a failure to make progress towards many of the chronic programs that plague humanity. Consider these two quotes, both from presidents – just over 50 years apart. 

“The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease [(cancer)]. Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal.”

–President Richard Nixon, 1971

“I believe we can usher in the same unwillingness to postpone [that fuelled the space race], the same national purpose that will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills to end cancer as we know it and even cure cancers once and for all. (Applause.)”

–President Joe Biden, 2022

There is something strange about these speeches being able to be given fifty years apart. Even if you accept that there has been a great deal of progress, this progress is insignificant when compared to very quickly innovating industries (like say the IT industry).

The healthcare system has embarked on a few large scale projects to improve health since Nixon gave that first speech. In the 1970s, it seemed like the ‘pharmaceutical approach’ to healthcare would ultimately cure all disease. Based on the successful project that largely created highly effective treatments to the majority of infectious diseases, the approach was expanded to address all diseases. This project was basically to uncover the underlying biology and produce a pill to correct it. While the philosophy of a ‘Pill for Every Ill’ remains (75% of doctor’s visits resulting in a prescription and patients having on average one prescription for every month they are alive) the program was ultimately unsuccessful. There is no effective pill for depression, cancer, or dementia. 

In the 1990s, it seemed like the human genome modelling project would be the panacea of medicine. It was that which would find targeted therapies to cure all diseases, and find the genes that lead to each of the unexplained diseases. Unfortunately, a major learning was that far fewer genes directly relate to specific diseases than we imagined. Diseases seem to come out of a complex interplay of genes and environment. 
 

Healthcare Institutions

Healthcare is the single greatest expenditure of both the UK and the US, one in every five dollars in America goes to healthcare. This expenditure is partly due to the increase in sickness, but also due to the lack of productivity improvements in healthcare. A study by Mckinsey in the US, found that healthcare accounted for 9% of the growth in the US economy between 2001 – 2016, but 29% of the new jobs, meaning that the economic growth in the healthcare system was driven by increasing staffing, not productivity. In the UK, independent analysis has found the NHS was increasing in productivity before the COVID pandemic, but there is still a claimed productivity crisis in the NHS. 

While healthcare institutions may not be getting more productive economically, there is also an argument that they might be delivering better and more healthcare. National statistics generally show a modest decrease in In-hospital mortality, Condition-specific mortality rates, 30-day readmission rate (no national data), surgical complications, hospital-acquired infections, medication errors, and patient perception.

What is the Outlook?

In addition to the issues already discussed, the rise in illness across all age groups, declining lifespans, and shrinking health spans present significant challenges—particularly given the aging population and the ongoing Covid pandemic.

This is a major, humanity-wide issue and there is a significant and pressing need for innovation.

What is The Seed Fund project?

The Seed Fund project will initially be analysing new companies and new products that make a significant impact on human health in the UK, US and Europe.

While many of the innovations will be products and technologies sold to business, this will also include a consumer angle as consumers continue to increasingly focus on their health. For example, in the UK:

1. 50% of UK consumers report to be eating more healthily 
2. Gen Z and Millenials are spending more on healthcare and wellness than older generations
3. Roughly half of consumers have bought a wearable device
4. 73% of UK residents consider wellness a top priority in their lives
5. The size of the healthy cleaning product market has skyrocketed. 

In the future, The Seed Fund will look to invest in small new startups in the UK working within these spaces in the near future.