Hello and welcome
I’m so grateful you’re here at JulesWalters.com. I’ve started this blog based on 30 years’ experience of working in science and health. I am a biohacker and longevity pioneer with a first-class degree in molecular genetics, a 20-year career working with innovators in science, and a background in journalism.
I’ve put all those different threads together to bring you important topics in consumer health. My motivation is to help you live your longest, healthiest life.
Why now? Well, we certainly live in an extraordinary time science-wise: it’s just that most people don’t know about the groundbreaking discoveries that could help us live longer, healthier lives.
Early career in journalism
But first let me back up and tell you a little about me. My career started in Australia at The West Australian newspaper back in the late 1980s. As a rookie reporter, I learned how to cover the days’ news, starting on the weather desk! Once I reported the right temperature in Vienna, I was allowed to move onto more significant topics.
From there, I covered court reporting and politics. I followed a love of journalism to the United Kingdom, where I worked in London newspapers – note the typewriter in the picture. Yes it was that long ago!
Television followed, putting together the daily breakfast television program Good Morning Britain. (Think Good Morning America with different accents.) We had one computer in the corner of the newsroom to access the internet, but there were no pictures and no one really knew how to use it. This was all pre-Google.
Curing cancer?
I met my wonderful husband Peter in television and together we have two grown-up sons. When the boys were small, I was lucky enough to take a career break and return to college to study molecular genetics full-time at King’s College London. I was motivated by a desire to cure cancer but the reality was another matter. I didn’t have the patience to do all the experiments at the bench.
Science is really an exercise in failure: 9 out of 10 experiments don’t work: maybe more – and your job as a scientist is to figure out why. Was it the buffer or the solution? I was much more interested in going to the local high school and communicating about the wonders of DNA.
Bridging the gap
I found the link between science and the real world through business.
Groundbreaking science usually takes decades to get out of the lab and then, once it’s finally available, the world often ignores it for another decade. The power of the status quo is quite something.
So with my husband, we started a series of businesses to try to bridge the gap between new science and its use in the real world.
One company called Raremark helped to get cutting-edge research from the lab to phones, particularly for people living with rare, medical conditions.
Women staying strong
More recently, as I’ve gone through my 50s, I’ve realized that women in particular face a huge information gap when it comes to staying healthy post menopause.
As the wonderful Dr Jen Gunter sums it up her book The Menopause Manifesto: if menopause were on Yelp, it would have one star.
We muddle through a huge change in hormones, and then find there’s not much expectation on the other side.
It’s a bit like: “Oh, you’re still here then?”
As one example: more than half of all Caucasian women aged 50 and older are thought to have low bone mass. African Americans do a little better with one in three with low bone mass after the age of 50. That means their bones are getting weaker, which should be a big red flag to do something about it.
The good news is that there are simple things that can be done. So please read on! My motivation is to make the world a more possible place for women, particularly through health. I hope you find the information I’ve pulled together helpful. I always welcome input, ideas and feedback, so please do email me at: jules@juleswalters.com.