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I Gave Claude Code My Whole Genome (And It's Amazing)

Nick Saraev·youtube.com·23 min read·Mar 28

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I uploaded my genes to clod code a couple of months ago and then had it build me a system

that cross-referenced my own genetic snippets with publicly available databases online

to show me which snippets corresponded to which disease risk, which vitamins to take,

which sorts of exercise to do, and more. This totally changed my life. I found that I was a

carrier for a debilitating disease called cystic fibrosis. I found what foods and vitamins work

for me really, really well and which ones don't. And in general, I customized my health using my

genetic data. Since then, my sleep has been basically perfect every night. I've had

significantly more energy. I'm in the best shape of my life. And the best part is all of this used

to cost tens of thousands of dollars just a few years ago. Now it's accessible to everybody through

clod code and a couple of clever workarounds. So in this video, I'm going to go first over the results,

including an actionable plan, a disease risk summary, and more, aka what you get from using a

system like this. Then I'm going to show you guys how it works, including how DNA functions,

which databases to use, and so on and so forth. And then finally, I'll cover some ways that you

can do it too. I'm going to give you all the templates and all the files that you need in

order to do this down below in the description. And then I'll also talk about some ways you can

extend this further into maybe a product or a health suite, how you can do this for maybe like

your parents or your family members, and a couple of other things as well. Just so we're all on the

same page here, people aren't the same out of the box, right? We're different heights, we have

different eye colors, we have different skin types, and so on and so forth. The reason why

is DNA, essentially an instruction manual for how you are to be put together. It's the same thing

as like architectural blueprints for a building. And the thing is, all of ours are a little bit

different. Now, in case you didn't know, your DNA is written as basically an alphabet of four

characters, A, T, C, and G. And this is something of what it looks like. Obviously, this is a representation

of your DNA, it's not going to be as beautiful and colorful and stuff like that zoomed in. But

essentially, we have these two double helices over here, okay? And both of them have these four

letters attached. Cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. Now, your DNA is really, really long. On

average, it's something like three billion of these letters, which tell your body how to build and run

everything that it needs to do. And the crazy thing is, and the whole reason why this works, is because

with today's science and access to consumer technology, you can actually export your entire DNA

into a text file. Now, some of these text snippets are going to lead to good outcomes, like maybe

disease risk prevention, intelligence, and so on and so forth. Whereas others are going to lead to

poor outcomes. Think short lifespan, maybe skin damage, maybe prevalence of some risk of

cardiovascular disease. What's really cool is by this point, we've done a lot of studies on all the

different snippets and what they ultimately result in in terms of your health. So there are publicly

available databases out there that catalog what all these different snippets of letters do. With

Claude Code, we can take that big text file, because it is a large language model that does

really, really well on language, and then build a flow that takes this, then consults these databases

on your own snippets, interprets them using AI's natural intelligence, and then gives you a high

quality report. It's worth me saying, this obviously used to be really expensive. You needed genetic health

consultations, you needed tons of tests, and so on and so forth. But now anybody can have a

personalized genetic report to allow you to customize how you treat yourself, your health, the foods you

ingest, and so on and so forth, for a fraction of a fraction of the price. And I'm going to show you

how to do all that in a second. So the system itself is right over here. Now, I visualize this

using a tool called Excalidraw, and I'll run you through how all of it works in a second. But first,

I just want to show you the Claude Code workspace, and then make sure that we're all on the same page

regarding the files and Claude.mds and so on and so forth. So this is my Claude.md. And for anybody that

doesn't know, this is the high-level instruction that is injected at the beginning of every

conversation inside of my IDE, in this case, VS Code. What this is, is a comprehensive genetic

health analysis pipeline that processes data from a particular provider called 23andMe to generate

detailed health reports. And it's worth noting that I got my DNA tested for like 70 or 80 Canadian

dollars. Granted, this is a few years ago, but all different services have, nowadays, most of them

anyway, have the ability to export your genetic data as a giant text file. And when I say giant text

file, by the way, this is what I'm referring to. I mean, we could take this and scroll all the way down

here to like 600,000 lines, and we're still getting little snippets of DNA. So I'll give you guys a

list of different providers you could use for different areas around the world and so forth at

the end of this. But to make a long story short, they basically mail you a tube, you spit in the

tube, you mail it back, and then a few weeks later, you get your DNA. So the output of this Claude.md

is three reports in the reports directory. We have first an exhaustive genetic report. Now this gives us

an analysis of our lifestyle and our health genetics, including drug metabolism, which is really

important. Methylation, which in my case I had a particular issue with. Nutrition, your fitness,

your cardiovascular health, your sleep and circadian rhythm, and then also some drug gene interactions

from a database called PharmKeyGKB. And so essentially some people here just do worse with

specific drugs because of the way that your DNA is written. After that, we get an exhaustive disease

risk report, including a pathogenic variant. So if you have, you know, cystic fibrosis carrier gene,

like I do, for instance, is where you'd figure that out. Your status for recessive conditions,

risk factors, drug response variants, and then protective variants. And then finally an actionable

health protocol, which is a comprehensive protocol that basically summarizes all this and then gives

you like a daily routine to use. And since using this daily routine, I've maxed out my sleep score.

I've been recovering significantly better in the gym. I've been in the best shape of my life. And

I've had PRs that I didn't really thought I'd be able to do. You also get a bunch of other stuff

like dietary frameworks, exercise protocols, blood pressure management, and so on and so on and so on

and so forth. If you're interested in optimizing your health, though, that's the one that you want to

spend most of your time on. So I'm not going to go through the rest of this Claude.md because that's

more or less the most important part. But there are different impact magnitudes, which are basically

the scientific consensus on how likely a specific, what are called single nucleotide polymorphism,

SNP, or little gene snippet, to causing an impact on you and your DNA. And so there's an impact

magnitude scale here between zero to six, where if it's a zero, you probably don't need to take it

super seriously. If it's a one, there's probably a minor effect. If it's a two, it's moderate,

three high. And if it's between a four to a six, you should absolutely take a look at it because

there's just a wealth of knowledge out there on a specific, you know, gene effect. And in all

likelihood, you're probably suffering from it in one way or another. The last thing I'll say before

I run this puppy is I'm not a doctor. This is not meant to, you know, replace an actual medical

professional on any of this stuff. Obviously, we're doing what we can with what we have. Not

everybody here has access to super straightforward, easy healthcare. And this is not a substitute for

that. But it is a way that you could take maybe a little bit more of your health into your own

hands. If you're the sort of person that freaks the hell out about this stuff, if you're the sort

of person that would read, you know, your genetic data and then see some disease risk or something

and not be able to sleep for the next year, I don't necessarily recommend going through this.

But if you're the sort of person that can look into the void and, you know, confront it and be okay

with it and use it to improve your life, then I certainly think this has tremendous value for you.

Okay, so like with any agentic workflow or IDE or cloud code based thing, obviously, it's a chat box,

so I'm going to talk to it. And in my case, I already have a couple of reports that have

previously generated, including the actionable health protocol, complete health report, the risk

report, genetic report, and just a bunch of other subsidiary things. Like I ask it to generate me

a meal plan, a shopping list, a list of supplements, and so on and so forth. But just because of that,

I'm going to have it generate a new one, and I'm going to be very explicit in it. I'd like you to

generate a new set of health reports. I'm doing this for a demo, so it's important that you go

through the entire process start to finish. Call them all V2 at the end of it. Don't just duplicate

my prior reports. Once I press enter, it'll start working. So we go to thinking, and it's going to

run the full genetic health analysis pipeline for me. It does so pretty quickly because we've

basically gone out and already gotten that data from the databases. You can see that we now have

the full genetic analysis, and it's generated a bunch more reports. It processed 621,000 single

nucleotide polymorphisms and scanned against a bunch of ClinVar entries and, you know, a bunch of

other databases and stuff like that. So what do these things actually look like? Now I'm going to use

the actionable health protocol because that's just the most interpretable for you guys, and I'll let you

guys take a look at the other ones. I don't want this video to be three hours, but at the very top,

you're going to get something like critical genetic findings. It's going to tell you about things that

it considers to be highly relevant to you, things you should probably get checked out.

So in this case, it recommends I get an echocardiogram, for instance, because I have some

form of, and you know, it's a low confidence, mind you. It's not telling me you need to do this right

now. Holy crap, you're going to die. But it says, hey, genetically speaking, you may have congenital heart

disease. You may have some mannose binding protein deficiency. You're a cystic fibrosis carrier with high

confidence. You have these pathogenic, you know, variants and so on and so forth. And not a lot

of this stuff is super relevant to me. But if I continue scrolling down, you see that it gets a

lot more specific about what I should do. So for instance, you're a confirmed carrier of this

disease. Health implications, you have 10% reduced lung functions. You have 2 to 3x increased risk of

pancreatitis. You have a higher prevalence of chronic rhinosinusitis. I don't know what that is.

And possible male fertility effects. So in my case, you know, I should probably do a baseline

pulmonary function test. I should probably not smoke. I recommend genetic counseling because

if I have a partner and they have the same thing, then our kid's probably going to have this terrible

disease and so on and so on and so forth. Underneath that, I have a daily protocol, which recommends

various supplements to take to basically balance out my body's inability to produce a variety of

nutrients and chemicals. So for instance, here, it recommends that I supplement with this thing

called methylfolate, which in my case, one of the pathways that's used to generate some energy. And

so I need to supplement with this thing called methylfolate right over here to kind of make up for

it. This is probably the biggest lifestyle improvement. I noticed almost immediately within

two or three days after taking this consistently, my energy levels were through the roof and my sleep

significantly improved. But there are a variety of other recommendations as well. I should take

preformed vitamin A, lutein and zeaxanthin and vitamin D3 and so on. Now, I don't recommend just

taking a big supplement stack at once. I recommend kind of introducing it into your lifestyle slowly,

but surely. This is the first thing that I introduced. I felt an impact. So then I continued

down the way. I found that some of these things kind of upset my stomach and stuff like that. So

I'm still in the process of figuring out exactly what timing to take these and so on and so forth.

In my case, I'm a very poor metabolizer of caffeine. And so despite the fact that I used to

love drinking, you know, a big Starbucks of venti frappa mocha latte with three extra cherries on top

or whatever, you know, I found that it just has absolutely bodied my sleep, my energy levels,

make me really anxious and stuff like that. So it actually tells me, hey, you should probably

wait for your adenosine to clear 90 to 120 minutes. When you take a coffee, you should probably take

much less of a coffee than you would imagine. You're an intermediate metabolizer, you have slow

dopamine clearance and so on and so on and so forth. None of these are like self-fulfilling prophecies,

right? And I don't want anybody here to like read one of these and get really freaked the hell out

about it. But suffice to say, tremendous amount of value. Notice how it gives you midday supplement

recommendations, evening supplement recommendations. I have a big dietary framework here that it

recommends for my own longevity, loading potassium. And yeah, I can go really, really deep into this

stuff. But essentially, ever since incorporating all of these actionables into my day to day life,

I felt substantially better. And, you know, this is something that previously would have cost me

five, $10,000 to do. I'm going to give you guys access to all this stuff, obviously not my own

actionable health protocols and analysis results, but everything else that you guys need.

But what's cool is once you have this, you could very quickly and easily just ask

Claude Code to come up with some other things for you. So for instance, I had to come up with a

little meal plan here, and I've actually eaten a fair few of these at this point, which is quite

nice. I told her that I was, you know, aiming to bulk up and, you know, I'm at the gym. I need

certain protein goals and stuff like that. And I went through and it just gave me a bunch of breakfast

options, gave me a bunch of simple and straightforward lunch options, you know, dinner options, so on and so

forth. Something else that was super cool to me was a genetic optimized shopping list where it

basically ran through and gave me a bunch of things that, you know, I could buy

that automatically give me a lot of the nutrients that, you know, my body is asking for. So I'm not

going to eat all these things. For instance, I absolutely hate tempeh to death, and that's

definitely not making it onto my shopping list. But, you know, just being able to communicate with

it on essentially a knowledge base that is you is super valuable, as I'm sure you could tell.

So with all that done, let me run you through at a high level how all of this works.

Basically, what you do at the beginning is you feed in that big text file, which in my case is

genome.txt. It has a script called run full analysis. What this full analysis does is it

takes your big genome, which is separated into a particular format depending on what provider you

use. In my case, I use 23andMe. It verifies whether it's valid. And if so, okay, it calls

two major databases. The first is PharmGKB. And as you see here, it's a comprehensive clinical

pharmacogenetic resource created to support and expand knowledge on pharmacogenetics, which is

essentially the interactions of various pharmaceuticals with your own genes. Some

people are much more likely to be sensitive to things like caffeine. Some people will take

certain antibiotics and it'll really screw them up. Other people will take various drugs,

steroids, whatever the hell you're doing. And because of your pre-existing genetic factors,

that'll work either better for you or worse. And so this is the first thing that I was really

interested in figuring out. Simultaneously with that, it also calls ClinVar, which is a database

that essentially aggregates tons of information about all of the various variations in your genetic

code. And then contrast that against published studies that are out there saying, hey, we ran a

big study on 10,000 people. And we found that when they had this genetic variant, it led to significantly

higher likelihood of this. Or when they had this genetic variant, it meant that they were better at

sprinting or whatever. There were a couple of other smaller databases out there that provide less

information than both of these. But basically, the very first thing that this script does is it just

gets all of the information related to the snippets of your genome that you have fed in. From there,

on the left-hand side, it'll match your pharmacogenomics and it'll identify drug interactions

before giving you some sort of aggregated result. In the middle here, it'll run a full health analysis

matching what are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, those little changes in your genes,

to the database. Then it'll categorize them as drug metabolism, methylation, nutrition, fitness,

cardiovascular, sleep. And on the right-hand side, with all these disease from ClinVar,

we'll identify if it's like a true SNP. Sometimes it's not. And then it'll classify

the significance in four bins, pathogenetic variants, carrier status, risk factors, and

protective variants. And what's really cool here is like, there are a few services out there that

already do this sort of thing. Basically, they allow you to, you know, pump in your genome or

whatnot. And then they cross-reference it against a bunch of things and they spit out some really dry

summary. But these are really dry summaries. You can't really do much with that. And to be honest,

like unless you have a bunch of genetic knowledge, unless you're basically like a freaking full-blown

doctor, your ability to interpret this stuff will be very, very minimal. And so what this does is it

allows you to basically take all of this and almost like how you can upload a PDF to ChatGPT and talk

back and forth with it, you do the same thing here. You can basically talk back and forth with your

own genome. After that, we generate three reports. We have the actionable health protocol, the exhaustive

disease risk, and then finally the exhaustive genetic report. Okay, so if you actually wanted to do

this yourself, how would I go about it? Well, the very first thing you're going to need to do is you're

going to need to go and find some way to obviously sequence portions of your genome. So there are five

main services right now that I'd recommend if I remember how to draw on AND. The first is 23andMe. The

second is Ancestry. The third is, I think it's called MyHeritage. The fourth is, I think, LivingDNA.

And then the fifth is, I think it's called FamilyTree. And you'll see that a lot of these are focused

around the family component, right? Ancestry, your heritage, and so on and so forth. And the whole

idea is, like, basically, instead of doing all this science stuff to find out gene symbols for your

own health, they just show you which people have had this test that are similar that you might be

related to based off genetic proximity. What's cool is a lot of these lie to export your raw genome.

So you could use these in order to basically, you know, get a test kit between $50 to $100, spit in a

tube, and then when you send it back in a few weeks, as mentioned, they will give you your raw genome.

So in my case, I use 23andMe. 23andMe has a particular format that they force the output to

be, which is a little bit different from the Ancestry, Heritage, FamilyTree ones, and so on

and so forth. But, you know, all you really need to do if you're using a different provider is when

you get the results back, just upload it as genome.txt and just say, hey, instead of the 23andMe

format, I'm using the Ancestry DNA format or something like that. And by doing so, it'll have,

you know, publicly available information on what that format looks like, and it'll just change that

into one that works for the API calls in our system. Now, I should note that there is a

technical difference here between what we're doing and then like a full DNA test. What these

are called are genotyping. Now, genotyping is basically where you look specifically for around

600,000 or so gene snippets, because like you do have a very long DNA snippet, right? We talked

about 3 billion letters. So instead of the 3 billion, we just look at like the 600,000 that are the most

likely to have impacts and stuff like that on health, the ones that are most studied. But you

can also do what's called full genome sequencing, if you wanted to go a little bit further, which

allows you to read through all 3 billion of those. And the resulting text file is freaking massive,

by the way. You'll get more data with full genome sequencing, but I want you to know that it's like

a marginal improvement. I think you probably get 80% of all the information that you need in order to

make actionable health decisions from genotyping. And it only costs, as mentioned, like 50 to 100 bucks,

usually, you know, the full genome sequencing will certainly squeeze out a little bit more of that.

But you know, in this case, we get to the point where it's like, I don't know, 300 to maybe like

$500, which I think makes it less accessible for the average consumer. And if you wanted to do this

for yourself, all you really have to do is click on the link in the description, you'll open up the

cloud code has my genome appropriately named folder here, you'll find a genetic health folder,

which you do is just right click, download that, you guys will get that in the bottom right hand

corner is a zip file. From there, what you need to do is open up any IDE or integrated development

environment, I'm going to be using VS code for this, then inside of VS code, I'll go open folder,

I'll just go to downloads, see if I could find a genetic health, there we go, and then just click

open. Now you'll have loaded up all of the context and files and stuff like that, that I had there in

that demo that I showed you, there'll be nothing in TMP, it's just a temporary folder. Inside of data,

you'll have all the information from these various services and databases, so ClinVar,

PharmK, GKB, and so on and so forth. There'll be nothing in reports, that's where all of yours are

going to go. And then finally, underneath scripts, you're going to have things like the Analyze

Genome, Full Health Analysis and stuff with Cloud.md. Once you're done with that, all you do is you go and

you upload your genome. So I'm going to go find it, in my case, mine's right over here, I'm going to go

drop it into data. Now that I have this, I'm going to go open it up in Cloud code, so just double tap

anywhere on the screen, click on that little puppy. I'll go over here and I'll say, hey,

could you run a genetic analysis on genome.txt? And it'll have all the contacts of what it needs

to do with Cloud.md. Sometimes it forgets which Python instance to use, and that's fine. There it

goes again with the damn Python 3. It's my own fault. It'll go run the full genetic analysis based

off of your genome, and then boom, you have those three files that I showed you guys earlier. So you have

actionable health, disease risk, and then genetic report as well. Click on whichever ones you want,

and then boom, now you have it. You could also get your parents' DNA, help them out if they wanted

to know that. Maybe you have a friend or a family that's wondering if they have some genetic condition

or whatever. I don't recommend just being like, hey, let me do this for you. I do recommend asking

them and saying, hey, are you comfortable with this? Do you want me to run it for you? Do you want

to run it for yourself? Maybe link them this video or something. Also make sure that they understand that

by doing this, they will reveal a fair amount of information about themselves. And I think for some

people that's fine, as mentioned, but for other people, I can really freak them out. I'm reminded of an

instance in which somebody reasonably close to me did some big full body MRI, and then they found out

that they have some little brain thing which might pop at any moment and kill them. And they freaked

the hell out about it for a couple years, something like that, thinking about it basically every night

before they did, you know, another test, and they found out that it was just a false positive.

And so there is, you know, some false positives here, obviously treat everything I'm saying with a

grain of salt. But the ultimate goal is just to empower your health and become better at managing your

own life. Now, in terms of ways that, you know, you can expand this and keep on going,

I was thinking about ways to do so. Obviously, the first is you could take everything that I've

shown you here, and then do a full genome sequence. And then maybe you could squeeze another 20% of it

out of there. You could also use this to build out, say, like a product suite where, you know,

you take somebody's uploaded genome, and then you use AI to explain in simple and natural language,

like the things that the person needs to do in order to, you know, probably have a better life.

You could build probably like a little iOS app, you'd probably build a little Android app to do

that if you really wanted to. You could also contact these major companies and maybe build

something out that works in tandem with them. For instance, I think that it is a real tragedy

and shame that 23andMe and Ancestry and these other services don't just provide what I'm showing

you right out of the box, because I think it's like so extraordinarily powerful and helpful for a lot

of people. You could take these summaries, give them to people like your personal trainers at the gym,

you could give them to, I don't know, your doctor, for instance, you could build brief little

summaries here so that your doctor has all the context that they need on things that you are

genetically predisposed to. Obviously don't freak anybody out, and some doctors really hate it

when you try and advocate for your own health like that, so be careful. But suffice to say,

all of this stuff will just help empower you a little bit more. Before you have kids,

I would highly recommend doing something like this. Genetic counseling and whatnot can be pretty

expensive depending on where you are in the world, whether or not, you know, your healthcare is

public or private or whatnot. So I would recommend doing something like this. In my case specifically,

as mentioned, I'm a carrier of a pretty debilitating disease, cystic fibrosis. There's some mild impacts on my

health and stuff like that as a result, but the main thing is mostly like my kids. So before I have

children, you know, I'm going to make sure that the person that I'm going to have children with

does something like this so we could see, hey, you know, do you also carry this gene which only has,

you know, a three to four percent incidence rate in my population? If so, we're going to have to talk

about how to approach this a little bit differently. So yeah, all of it for the benefit of you, your health,

your family, and so on and so forth. And I'm really excited to be able to share stuff like this with you,

because I think that's really the next step of not just cloud code for building apps and stuff

like that, but also for things like your own healthcare. So if you do anything cool with this,

if you end up building a cool product or just running it on yourself and figuring out something

cool, let me know. I would absolutely love to hear. One thing I didn't mention here at all were any of

the privacy concerns involved in uploading your DNA to a service. I want to make it clear here that I

don't care about that personally. A lot of people here might. So if you've been hearing alarm bells the whole

video, that's okay. Sure. Send me a comment down below. You know, we can chat about your own personal

thoughts on that and, you know, whether it's okay that big LLM owns your whole genome. But my take on

it is like they already own basically everything about you, so it's not that big of a deal.

If you guys want to build this sort of thing yourself, but you're not entirely sure how to do so,

leave a comment down below. We're happy to help you. I'll walk you guys through maybe some

additions to the system and so on and so forth. And if you guys like this sort of thing, do me a solid

subscribe to the channel. A big chunk of people that are watching are unfortunately just not subscribed for

whatever reason. That's just how YouTube is. Hopefully I helped you with something cool today.

Have a lovely rest of the day and I'll catch all y'all in the next video. Thanks so much. Bye.

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