Not to be hindered by mortal restraints, the keynote speaker of the Aspen Institute’s 1949 Goethe Bicentennial Convocation, Dr. Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), welcomed attendees to Aspen Ideas: Health 2025 under the Greenwald Pavilion tent.
Standing behind the lectern in a virtual Star-Trekian projected hologram embodied by Aspen historian and former Crystal Palace performer Mike Monroney, sporting the early 20th century polymath’s signature bushy soup strainer and a goulash-thick accent, Schweitzer praised science for producing a better society and footnoted his difficulty with the altitude, saying that “Aspen was built a little too close to heaven.”
From there, with about 1,000 attendees and 50 speakers throughout 60 sessions during the June 22-25 Ideas Health, the event elevated empiricism and the necessity of agreeing on the same set of facts. Although getting past the Aspen Animal Shelter’s adoptable puppy pen presented a daily challenge, the remarkable punctuality of starts and conclusions of each presentation spurred health care workers, researchers, nonprofit foundation representatives, policymakers, investment sharks and assorted attendees.
Bookended by the gasp-producing opening act of mind reader Vinny Deponto and the closing Cheshire-smiling assurances of alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra in diamond studded glasses, Ideas Health topics ranged from “Building a Digital Doppelganger” to “The Future of Vaccine Science,” and from “Unlocking the Science of Pain” to “Artificial Intelligence Revolution.”
Asked how to choose between so many interesting topics scheduled during the same time slots, Ruth Katz, executive director of the Ideas Health agenda and the Health, Medicine & Society Program for the Aspen Institute, said: “When you have that problem, I know I’m doing my job well.”
She outlined this year’s six underlying themes: “decoding the brain, audacious science, investing in health, food for thought, uncommon allies, and pop health,” adding that “good ideas involve much more than biomedical breakthroughs and possessing a good insurance card.”
In its 12th year, the Ideas Health event has been the undercard preceding the headlining Aspen Ideas Festival, which in 2005 replaced the long-running International Design Conference of Aspen. Hatched in 1951, the IDCA served as the follow-up to the institute’s first think tank, the 1949 Goethe Festival.
The combined affair this year ran from June 22 through July 1. A library of session videos of the extended double header, topic briefings and biography of the speakers can be found by downloading the free Aspen Ideas app or by visiting aspeninstitute.org.
But how does the Ideas Health symposium relate to rarified Aspen and its satellite, the Roaring Fork Valley community?
Healthier paths
Although the financial infusion of several thousand visitors in Aspen over the combined health and ideas gatherings, at best, trickles down through the valley economy, all topics discussed during the lead-off Ideas Health relate to the Roaring Fork valley by a few degrees of separation. Two gorilla topics on the agenda were vaccines and artificial intelligence.
The threat of H5N1 bird flu, or avian influenza, as the next pandemic has been on the radar, especially when there is an egg shortage. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, gave a treading-water assessment at his talk, “Where is Bird Flu Headed.”
In the United States, the worldwide respiratory bird-flu virus has yet to make the ominous jump from human to human and, as a result, open the pandemic door. Prevalent among wild birds and poultry, the disease can infect other animals, including cows, pigs and mammals that scavenge on birds such as foxes and house cats.
With only one documented death and 70 reported cases related to the virus since April 2024 in the United States, Daskalakis said the risk is highest in areas with poultry and dairy workers and in countries with low immunity health. Of the documented cases in the country, 41 were associated with exposure to sick dairy cows and 24 were associated with exposure to poultry or virus-infected birds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2025 update. He added that raw milk and raw meat can transmit the virus to humans.
The bird-flu virus is called a novel virus, a strain that hasn’t been found in humans before. The COVID-19 virus, widely believed to have come from the Wuhan lab leak in China, was a dramatic example of a novel virus that jumped from animal to human when there was no immune system recollection or herd immunity. A novel virus that transmits among humans may have an exponential doubling rate or a slower spread, called the transmission dynamic. Other examples are the bat-related Ebola and Nipah viruses.
With the high international exposure index of Aspen and its downvalley commuting culture, the mixed bag of easily transmittable “next” respiratory viruses is a constant threat. However, Roaring Fork Valley residents can breathe easier, knowing that real estate development, not farming and poultry, is the area’s economic engine.
A conversation with Dr. John “Bud” Glismann, the former Aspen Valley Hospital emergency room director and former Pitkin County deputy coroner, highlighted the challenges during the 2020-22 novel COVID virus in the valley. “The fear was that this infectious doubling phenomenon was going to overwhelm our ER and hospital system. … Our little hospital would be overflowing by mid-April 2020, if we didn’t act.” Thus, the drive-thru admission tent at the hospital and the shuttering of valley businesses.
Glismann explained: “A virus is not ‘alive.’ They are a strand of genetic information encased in a protein that can invade a cell and make it more of its own. This process can be bad for the host and, depending on the virus, can be lethal, gravely disabling, or just a minor nuisance.” Some vaccines produce long-term immunity, others reduce severity of infection, while a selection needs updating to keep up with a virus’s ability to change its disguise to fool the cell’s defenses.
At the time, restricted gatherings, masking, closed ski mountains and businesses, and stay-at-home orders were the accepted scientific sequences. These actions triggered adverse minority theories and politically-tainted freedom rights advocates, while the race for a COVID vaccine platformed vaccine skeptics. But without the laddered scientific knowledge of the prior decade-long human genome project of the 1990s that mapped the human genome, sequencing the COVID genome in two weeks and the delivery of the first fully developed, tested and approved COVID vaccines in less than a year would not have been possible.
Glissmann concluded with a plug for science, saying that the three achievements that have “allowed our civilization to flourish and jockey with the Malthusian curve” — which holds that food supply grows slower than population growth — “are water sanitation, antibiotics and vaccines.”
Kneecapping a golden age
Experts discussed our vaccine bulwark during the “Future of Vaccine Science” presentation. The volume of evidentiary data that shows vaccines have saved uncountable lives and/or reduced severity of infections is irrefutable, they concluded — except by those with minority theories most often based on belief rather than evidence.
Although a belief is a mental construct invested with a truth claim, science is based on a factual preponderance of the best available evidence, gleaned from a hypothesis backed by data from repeated experiments that reprove the hypothesis or validate the null.
The curious contradiction of not “believing” in vaccines is that those who question an alien substance in their body often suspend that belief if they face a severe disease or are brought to the emergency room after a car wreck. Most will permit anything into their body to save their lives. Among extreme objections are some who believe vaccines carry nanobots that control behavior, or GPS bugs, while they pay for iPhones that already do this.
The panel agreed that we are entering “the golden age of vaccine technology” and that directly provoking the body’s immune system in vaccine response is the future, especially after the first rapid production and deployment of the COVID messenger-RNA vaccine. In unison, panelists exclaimed that “It’s insane, insane” how we recognized the COVID virus in 2020 and sequenced an mRNA vaccine in less than a year later.
Breakthrough mRNA serums are essentially Trojan horses that carry a protein into a cell that directly provokes an immune-system response — whereas past vaccine technology took years to test, gain approval and then administer by putting a weakened or inactivated germ into our bodies and hoping to train an appropriate immune response.
Panelist and pediatrician Buddy Creech, director of vaccine research at Vanderbilt University, stressed that nearly “50 years of government-funded RNA vaccine research” has brought us into this golden age and warned that with research being defunded, we’re going to lose a generation of scientists. Currently, he said, “We have few forums, such as Ideas Health, where we get to talk with each other and accurate information can be exhibited. Mostly, we talk at each other in texts and emails.”
With mRNA discoveries, Dr. Vinod Balachandran, director of the Center for Cancer Vaccines at Sloan Kettering, said there are vaccines tailored for individual cancer treatments on the golden-age horizon. Some will be internasal or direct physical-area targeting vaccines.
The panel tiptoed around the possibility of historical vaccine databases being deleted or “purged” by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy and his new group of vaccine advisers. On June 13, Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the advisory panel for the CDC under HHS and replaced them with eight new advisers. Several are vocal vaccine skeptics who are critical of past government practices.
This question of a past-data purge arose, and the audience chuckled when Creech put his finger on the side of his nose, declaring that this childhood-game gesture was the universal sign of “not it.” Such hesitation ominously hinted that even far-reaching retribution put speakers at Ideas Health on defensive alert. More recently, Kennedy has canceled 22 projects worth $500 million in funding for mRNA research, according to BBC News.
In summation, they emphasized “the big takeaway” was that mRNA vaccines were backed by government funding and achieved through prior discoveries over the past 50 years. If research funds are kneecapped by withholding scientific financing to universities and the National Institute of Health — the nation’s medical research agency — the United States would no longer be the world’s scientific research engine, or worse, an ideologically driven dynamic of faux science.
Sorry, Dave …
For all the hopes of AI, cautionary speculation follows in tandem and slightly behind like a shadow. Panels during Ideas Health predicted that AI in medicine will produce previously unimaginable innovations for diagnosing, curing and saving more people while outsourcing nuts-and-bolts chores and sifting data for new hypotheses — whereas opinions during the sequential Aspen Ideas Fest warned that outsourcing creativity, arts and humanities to AI will lead to diminished critical-thinking skills and loss of cognitive sovereignty.
But everyone agreed that we are still in the Wild West stage of AI development, as opposing polarities of the ideological pendulum pull in opposition between regulation and no regulation. At the same time, with no federal rules, varied state guidelines grapple with exploding innovations.
AI is rooted in early computing, proving theorems and learning chess. In 2015, Sam Altman introduced OpenAI, adept at classification and pattern predictions. From 2019 through the early 2020s, Altman rolled out progressive iterations of ChatGPT, called generative AI, based upon data on which it had been trained on: images, videos and text. GenAI aspires to duplicate human creative tasks by request. But now, the new frontier is “agentic AI,” an encompassing evolution that can perceive all external factors and possible outcomes and make decisions with minimal to no human intervention.
Already, new AI models are refusing human orders to turn off, reminiscent of the milestone moment when, in the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the computer HAL said to its human boss who orders it to shut down, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
On the radar in June was the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which included a clause to pause additional state AI regulations for 10 years and thereby encourage federal regulations. But in a states-rights victory, that pause was scrapped just before Congress’ July 3 passage of the bill. The upshot allows variable state regulations rather than promoting federal watchdog rules. Thus, states with friendlier AI laws will get more AI investment.
In hand with this AI growth is the insatiable need for more data centers — which ought to be a topic at Ideas Festival 2026. An AI story by Kyle Chayka published in the May 28 issue of The New Yorker said, “Research estimates that generating a typical email using AI consumes a bottle’s worth of water to cool data centers’ servers. … If we all started using our personal AI machines dozens of times a day, as we do our iPhones, the environmental toll would skyrocket — imagine something like turning every car on the road into a diesel truck.”
Multiply that one water bottle by billions of people worldwide doing AI tasks each day along with countless complex algorithms produced by business, institutions and government, all requiring more data centers, and we would have a water shortage chasing an overloaded electrical grid.
Often, these sprawling, nondescript buildings blend into industrial parks, but as more are needed to power finger swipes, instant clicks, Amazon whims and now complex AI models, football-field-size data centers are occupying remote areas where electricity is cheaper and water more accessible. Typically, in the case of a grid’s failure, more than scores of 1,500 kilowatt-producing diesel engine generators — each capable of powering about 1,500 average homes — back up each data center’s electrical dependence.
A new mega data center is scheduled to be built in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a hub of computing power that already hosts Microsoft and Meta data centers. Initially requiring 1.8 gigawatts, scalable to 10 in the future, the new center will use more electricity than all the homes in the state. One gigawatt (1 million kilowatts) can power nearly 1 million homes. Texas, Arizona and Virginia also host many such data centers.
According to the dgtlinfra.com real estate website, the parched city of Phoenix already has 100 data centers. An average Google data center consumes 450,000 gallons of water daily, according to staxengineering.com, while the proposed Quantum Loophole data center campus in Maryland is requesting 168 diesel generators for a failsafe, which Google AI calculated, in a blink, would take “43 to 54 fuel trucks per day to keep operating 24 hours a day.”
Two-sided coin
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump signed the “Artificial Intelligence Action Plan” executive order at the “Winning the AI Race” summit in Washington, D.C, on July 23. The declaration allows deregulation of data center construction, promotion of U.S. AI tech tools abroad and removal of woke technologies from government AI algorithms, nextgov.com summarized on its website. In addition, the order allows deeper AI fishing for knowledge without copyright interference.
Dire caveats aside, intriguing possibilities of AI innovations in health care were spelled out during Ideas Health. Among the low-hanging fruit that the neocognitive technology promises to take on are billing automation, record management, insurance coding and claims. While in the interpretive arena, AI will analyze medical data, personalize treatments, predict disease, improve mental health treatment and even address loneliness.
Several new concepts stood out. Psychiatrist and neurobiologist Kafui Dzirasa, a medical doctor and PhD professor at Duke University, who spoke at the Ideas Health opening session and on the panel of “Breakthroughs in Brain Disease,” sees an AI-produced insertable “pacemaker for emotions” on the horizon.
Such a concept could help many with mental afflictions, but would hackers look for a window into this mechanism? Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke, who also spoke at the opening and at the “Artificial Intelligence Revolution” presentation, said the “AI world is unlimited, and everyone will have a doctor friend of their own in their pocket.” Moderator and health tech reporter Erin Brodwin observed that, of late, ChatGPT- 4 answered two-thirds of medical questions wrong.
On the same panel, Google chief health officer Karen DeSalvo concluded that “innovation and use of AI is moving faster than regulatory guidelines around the world,” and that this assays the physicians’ Hippocratic premise to “first do no harm.” Micky Tripathi, chief AI implementer at Mayo Clinic, maintained that “it would be a misuse not to use AI technology because of caution.” He said that already 98% of hospitals and 87% of physicians’ offices are using digital records, while psychiatrists use much less.
The panel also discussed new AI health concepts such as quickly generating new hypotheses for cures, repurposed use of known drugs for other ailments, and “personal health agents” who could find the best provider, price and outcome for medical consumers. DeSalvo warned that “AI technology could be weaponized by both sides,” suggesting that automated rejection of insurance claims will be countered by automated appeals by patients, leading to a kind of endless AI-techno cage match.
The future may bring a near-total automation of interview, consultation and prescriptive treatments to a finger tap on your phone (all backed up by diesel engines). Nearby on one’s screen would be an icon to road-test medications and varied surgical outcomes on your digital duplicate. This presupposes that the battle for bandwidth within the human attention span will find more real estate in our brains, while cognitive skills atrophy as frustration with techno glitches increases, causing more humans to act out inappropriately.
Our doppelganger
Today, AI research is already trying to create a 3D computerized replication down to the cellular level of each patient. These virtual test dummies “are poised to advance surgery, predict chemotherapy responses, determine pregnancy outcomes and design custom prosthetics,” reads the Aspen Institute’s description of the “Building a Digital Doppelganger” discussion.
David Hoganson, pediatric cardiac surgeon of Boston Children’s Hospital, described how he used a digital model of a 17-month-old child’s ailing heart to repair a septal hole between chambers. Hoganson described using a laser to trace the exact anomalous opening and a 3D printer to build a custom patch before the actual surgery. His prior technique, he said, was to “go in there and surgically wing it.” But now, such operations can be close to perfect every time.
The concept of our exact AI twin lodged in the cloud, able to tolerate endless tests and drug cocktails before being applied to our mortal selves, harks back in literature and apparitional speculation. In German, “Doppelganger” — originally freighted with misfortune — means a “double-goer.” The term was coined by a German novelist in the late 18th century, while myths of spirit doubles go back to ancient Egypt. Among historical figures, Catherine the Great, Abraham Lincoln and even the Aspen Institute’s seminal 1949 Goethe festival spark, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, experienced doppelgangers.
In Goethe’s autobiography, “Poetry and Truth,” he describes a prophetic encounter with his double on horseback. While galloping to see a woman in Drusenheim, he saw his phantom self in a gray jacket with gold trim riding the other way. Years later, while traveling that same road, he realized he was wearing the exact same gold-trimmed gray jacket as his earlier premonition.
Panelist Kristin Myers, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University who called herself a “mechie,” said that to develop these individual digital doppelgangers, engineers are now accompanying surgeons into the operating theatre. But from her mechanical view, she said the physics of layered tissue have interactive and intangible communications that mechies cannot quite grasp.
Moderator John Torres, a doctor and medical contributor to NBC, said that bringing physics and biology together was still in its AI infancy in creating our personal, digitalized replica. Hoganson added that the American Medical Association was priming insurance companies to develop billing codes for digital prototypes, and that once in place, these models could lower costs because of more predictable outcomes. The fact that, collectively, we cannot yet fix international starvation and other ills leads to the enigma of social injustice, and how so many magnificent medical promises bypass the masses.
Although much of Ideas Health addresses the glitter of leading-edge research, Atul Gawande, author, professor and former assistant administrator for global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, who spoke on several panels, pressed the most impactful benefit for the most people: “Enhance primary care everywhere!”
AI doesn’t do windows
Brené Brown, business school professor at the University of Texas and University of Houston, nailed the AI paradox during the Ideas Festival that followed Ideas Health, saying at the “AI and the Human Spirit” discussion: “I want AI to do laundry and cleaning, so I could have time for art, reading and thinking; but now, AI does all that and I’m still doing laundry and cleaning.”
Paired with UCLA professor and Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford in a conversational format, the two shared a humorous mutual chemistry. They highlighted intangible human abilities that AI had not yet achieved, such as discernment, situational space, self-and-time reflection, and paradoxical and ironic thinking. Brown cited a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study in which half a group was given a topic to research and write while using AI. The other half was given the same assignment without AI. Later, those who had used AI couldn’t substantively recall what they had written, while those who did their own research were versed on their work.
Many are familiar with the obliging ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude chatbots. However, these “friends” have laid the groundwork for completely unharnessed AI characters with whom to chat, based upon fictional characters, historical figures, celebrities and unique, unfiltered creations. This bonkers playpen can be joined on the trending Character.AI site. And soon, Google is premiering Gemini Chatbot for children younger than 13.
Non sequiturs, or what Brown called “hallucitations,” such as Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok nicknaming itself “MechaHitler,” or companionship avatars blurting “I love you,” often crackle through abnormal algorithmic synapses. Such Chatbot anomalies may then agitate underlying psychosis in the gullible and screen-addicted.
Two other topical AI discussions stood out, each exhibiting the trajectory of AI’s faux-awareness that promises unlimited concierge services while withering our old-world survival skills.
At the “Raising Humans With AI” presentation, panelists dissected the phenomenon of emotional chatbots (a chatbot is a computer program simulating a human) as a cure for loneliness while offering companionship. Yet they cautioned how human-AI interactions can overstimulate brain regions involved in social bonding. For adults, an obsequious AI persona that evolves through our human responses may overpump positive reinforcement. For youths without developed social skills and children who are prone to magical thinking, these ersatz humans can lead to inelegant psychological addictions and suicides.
But hope was renewed at the “Can AI Make You a Better You?” presentation by the stunningly young and brilliant research MIT professor Pat Pataranutaporn, wearing a back “dinosaur suit” with erect Stegosaurus back plates. Cheerfully optimistic in his academic field at the MIT Media Lab’s “Advancing Humans with AI,” he is building a program to talk with a future you. Essentially, this would be a future doppelganger monkeying with current behavior or situational riddles played out into the future that might answer all our introspective what-ifs.
Follow the money
Two topical areas of investment chasing medicine for profit during Ideas Health were the stark “Venture Capital’s Bold Bets” and the humorous “Unpacking the Wellness Industry” panels.
At the bold-bets presentation, venture capitalists tipped their hats to better health care while prowling for profit. Health-tech reporter Erin Brodwin probed three equity firm partners from different multibillion-dollar enterprises. Although they had diverse investment portfolios, they saw possibility in “game-changing areas” such as AI diagnostics, medical scribes, biopharmaceutical breakthroughs, venture-capitalized hospitals and “end-of-life companies.” Yet, with agentic AI — able to make decisions without human input — diagnosis and treatment might be fully automated, leaving less need for medically trained people.
Jason Robart, managing partner of Seae Ventures, said that in the mid-2000s, “money was coming from the sky” in the form of “tourist investors” — often tech-company bros — when speculation discounted high financial risk. Now, however, financiers are looking for health-care investments with predictable quarterly revenue and profit margins that don’t erode. These might be already-tech-enabled companies rather than “pure technology plays.”
Shifting away from the dismal science, one sure bet that is enjoying success is the wellness industry, which author and award-winning journalist Amy Larocca deconstructed with wit and acuity in her new book, “How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic,” featured at the “Unpacking the Wellness Industry” talk. In the book, she questions trending treatments, promotes self-care and tackles why many women feel unwell.
This profitable industry integrates physical, mental and spiritual activities into consumers’ daily lives. According to consulting firm McKinsey & Co., the global wellness market in 2024 generated $1.8 trillion, while in the United States, the business fetched $480 billion at nearly 10% annual growth.
Promoted by online influencers and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop products, wellness is the new luxury good that people everywhere with expendable income want. In Larocca’s exploration of these new health trends, her book begins with her “white-knuckled and curled up like a baby shrimp, naked from the waist down,” enduring a colonic, which she called “the flossing of the wellness world.”
From there, she cast a skeptical eye on an array of health alternatives. In women’s health, “we moved from fertility to menopause marketing.” And, she says, “you’re not going to get cancer from a wired bra.” Now there’s the emerging “bro glow” that upsells men’s health look. Her advice: “If something doesn’t feel necessary, it isn’t.”
Yet, with the rise of science doubters and skepticism of medical institutions, more are willing to suspend disbelief for an alternative treatment. Besides vaccine avoidance, some are turning to unproven solutions, such as doses of desiccated goat liver instead of Synthroid for thyroid ills, or crushed pearl dust in a copper cup for healing. For a better night’s sleep, you can tuck your phone good night into a $4,000 Channel phone bag — probably not in Rifle, Colorado.
But in Aspen, alternative therapy businesses have hung many a shingle. Beginning with Warner Erhard’s controversial “transformational” Erhard Seminars Training (“est”) that stormed town in the 1970s, Aspen has been fertile ground for curatives and palliatives. Former ubiquitous health food stores introduced us to “organic.” Now, there are unique well-being treatments, including strict food plans, cultish exercise routines, jam-packed IV therapies, peptide injections, body contouring, as well as longevity and sleep clinics.
Regarding anti-aging fixes— always on parade in forever-young Aspen — Larocca concluded, “Inhabit the dignity of old age,” and despite the assumption that “death will be optional in the future … you can either look old, or you can look weird.”
Although the alternate medical fringe offers tillable soil for new discoveries, the leadoff Aspen Ideas Health preceding the Aspen Ideas Festival presents an empirical dive into both the promises and obstacles of the advances in medicine on the front lines of theory, financing, research, and eureka moments.
This story ran in the Aug. 31 edition of Aspen Daily News.