From Genetics to Energetics: An Optimistic New Framework for Biomedicine

The Energy Crisis in Health

Energy is the consilience point of diet, physical activity, environmental pollutants, and psychosocial stressors. Avoiding excess sugar, moving regularly, consuming unpolluted food and water, and social connections converge to sustainably charge our inner batteries – mitochondria. Our lives and health depend on energy flow through the body. Without energy, we die. But when our bodies are fed the right food, and our food is efficiently transformed into usable energy in our cells’ mitochondria, we can thrive. Only when powered by the right energy source can we heal physical and mental wounds to be healthy again. The path to Making America Healthy Again is understanding the energetic basis of human health and healing. We need an actionable scientific-cultural path to energize every American into achieving their full health potential, nourishing community and our collective spirit from the ground up.

The Genetic Dogma Behind Modern Medicine

Decades of research, trillions of dollars, and thousands of academic research careers have been devoted to building and upholding the current pharmaco-molecular health dogma. This dogma holds that human health is deterministically driven by inherited genetic variants, leading to manipulatable molecular mechanisms that can be targeted using small molecule therapeutics. This idea informed the primary outcome for the Human Genome Project, which aimed to discover genes responsible for cardiac, neurological, metabolic, oncogenic, psychiatric, and other chronic illnesses. Completed in 2001, the Human Genome Project officially failed to reach its primary outcome. Gene variants may confer minor risk, but do not determine when people get sick with which chronic illnesses. 

The Collapse of the Gene-Centric Model

Over the last 20 years, hundreds of increasingly large genome-wide association studies successfully disproved the pharmaco-molecular hypothesis. In spite of the evidence, deeply rooted scientific and financial forces have contributed to keep alive the compelling, logical, yet expired gene hypothesis, slowly turning it into dogma. Today, ingrained across multiple generations of scientists trained during the hopeful genomic era, the pharmaco-molecular health dogma permeates biomedical science and popular culture. It shapes our disempowering views of health, as well as how we teach and practice medicine.

The Failure of the Current Health Paradigm

Sadly, this paradigm has failed to improve population health, metabolic health, and mental health. In 2025, our country’s federal agencies must rethink health from first principles: The basis of health is healing: a dynamic, energetic process. Energy – the missing dimension of biomedicine – is the vital glue of our bodies and minds. It is the most fundamental element of our health. We must understand how human behaviors, aging, and health disorders along the lifespan arise energetically; and how to intervene, right at the most fundamental level of energy, to promote health before disease sets in. The path to a sustainable healthy future is understanding the energetic basis of healing so we empower every American to Make their Mitochondrial Healthy Again.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7255501

Martin Picard, PhD, is a pathfinding scientist and Associate Professor at Columbia University, renowned for founding the field of mitochondrial psychobiology, which explores the profound connections between energy flow, mitochondria, and human health.