Houston, We Have a Data Problem
Genomics is generating the most consequential dataset in history. The gap between generating it and having a vision for it will define the next era of human health, wealth, and power.
Lauren Berkowitz · May 19, 2026
Last week the BioIndustry Association, the UK's life sciences trade body, published a ten-year vision for turning the country's genomic and health data into a coordinated national economic asset, building on the £600 million Health Data Research Service the government committed to in April 2025. The framing was explicit: genomic data is national infrastructure, the same way roads and power grids are infrastructure, and the country that coordinates it best will compound advantages in AI-enabled medicine for decades. So far, the United States has not made a similar commitment.
Private investment in longevity science more than doubled in 2025, hitting $8.49 billion across 325 deals, flowing into DNA repair, genome stability, and aging biology, the same mechanisms the public infrastructure was supposed to be tracking. IQVIA's Global R&D Trends 2026 identifies coordinated real-world evidence as a primary solution to trial enrollment inefficiency, which has grown to a median of more than 16 months. Organized genomic data from characterized populations is precisely what that looks like in practice.
The people who have actually solved the data coordination problem are the ultra-wealthy, through concierge medicine and longevity programs, and their solution, even on top of all the AI, devices, and monitoring technologies, is a human being -- a dedicated curator whose job is to maintain a coherent, updated picture of one person's biological signals across every system and every reclassification. Not AI, not interoperability standards, but humans. The longevity community did not wait for the infrastructure problem to be solved. They hired around it. When the most medically sophisticated people in the world arrive at human curation as the answer to a problem that AI hasn't solved, the gap is real and it is large.
The United States is not falling behind on data collection. The data is flowing. It flows through hospital biobanks, research programs, the genomic tests that do get approved, and the normal mechanics of what happens when companies go bankrupt, where patient data becomes a balance sheet asset like any other. The US genomic dataset is enormous. What it is not is intentional. There is no national program, no coordinated infrastructure, no design for who the data serves or what flows back to the people who generated it. That is not a conspiracy. It is what happens when something this significant grows without a plan.