GRACE SHARMA: Last week, The Daily reported on Northwestern Medicine’s Human Longevity Clinic’s study on measuring biological age, City Council rejecting the “Circuit Breaker” program and NU’s Figure Skating Club placing 13th at Nationals.
From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Grace Sharma.
EMERSON LEGER: And I’m Emerson Leger. This is The Weekly, a breakdown of the top headlines from the past week.
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GRACE SHARMA: I’m here with Senior Staffer Betsy Lecy to talk about how the NU Medicine Longevity Clinic is measuring gait to reveal biological age. Could you start by explaining what exactly the NU Human Longevity Clinic is doing?
BETSY LECY: It’s a clinic in the Arkes Pavilion by the NU campus. It’s actually a really interesting story. There was an Amish family, and (they) carry this gene that statistically made a lot of them live longer. They did a study with them, and then they had this huge donor who found it super interesting, and they wanted to make a whole clinic based off of this one study. But essentially, through different tests, whether it’s your heart, with your retinas, how you walk — it all is going to measure some sort of biological age.
Chronological age,how old you actually are, so I’m 21, that’s your chronological age. But your biological age is based off of how you live and like lifestyle factors, or maybe you have a chronic illness — that’s how old your biological age (is). So it could be five years older than you actually are. They’re trying to measure that biological age with these physiological tests and then see if they can mitigate that age.
GRACE SHARMA: Your story is about using the human gait, specifically?
BETSY LECY: Yeah.
GRACE SHARMA: How does that work?
BETSY LECY: It all starts with the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab. This guy named James Cotton, he’s making this AI tool that, essentially, a person walks, and they have 10 different assessments within how an individual walks, and they’ll take videos of the person walking. It’ll be different types of things, walking back and forth across a room, or like standing. It’s a unipedal test where you’re standing on one leg. And they’ll all take videos with this smartphone, and it has an AI tool where it’ll make pinpoints at 2D locations and at 3D locations, and it can tell when one side of your body is off from the other side of the body. With that, they can measure how old you are, just from that AI tool, which is really neat.
GRACE SHARMA: You mentioned at the end of the article how there’s this greater trend of human longevity clinics around the nation. How does the specific NU lab fit in with all the clinics around the country, but also, how does it differ from what other clinics are currently doing?
BETSY LECY: That’s a great question. Everything started with the Chicago location, that’s the one in NU Medicine, but they’re hoping to expand beyond Chicago and within America as well, of creating different labs that all have the same protocol, so they all run the same tests, but those labs are also able to do studies based off of their populations and what they think would be applicable to them.
And so then they can do cross-sectional studies, and see, “Okay, people in America are doing this, and then people in Japan are like this.” And so comparing those populations so they can see how their environment affects the populations within them. The protocol is the same, but then they can also do studies that are different. He said they already have one going up in Japan, and there are some on the way. So that’s super cool.
GRACE SHARMA: What is the end goal with all of this research into health and biological age and comparing between different types of people?
BETSY LECY: They’re trying to take your biological age and just mitigate it so it’s the same as your chronological age. They’re doing a study with kids who have previously had cancer, and obviously, they had to go through chemo, and that obviously takes a toll on your body. So their biological age is, on average, more than their chronological age. So they’re trying to take marginalized populations like those, or people with HIV, and they’re trying to make it so their biological age is the same as chronological age.
The whole point of it is they’re not trying to do it towards a population that has wealth, but for people who have been discriminated against, whether it’s Black populations or people with chronic conditions — they’re trying to make it even. There’s a huge trend now with longevity clinics that are aimed at more wealthy populations, so they’re just trying to shorten that discrepancy.
GRACE SHARMA: Betsy, thank you so much for joining me on The Weekly.
BETSY LECY: Yeah, thanks for having me.
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GRACE SHARMA: Next, I’m here with Daily reporters Emily Dissanayake and Isabella Kunc to talk about why City Council rejected the “Circuit Breaker” program. Emily, could you start by just explaining what exactly the “Circuit Breaker” program is?
EMILY DISSANAYAKE: The “Circuit Breaker” program was first proposed by Ald. Clare Kelly (1st), who represents the 1st Ward, and essentially would have used $500,000 from the Affordable Housing Fund to provide qualifying residents with a credit equal to 20% of their property bill, and that’s after exemptions up to a maximum of $5,000. Clare Kelly was really pushing this pilot program because Evanston residents seem to be facing an increasing property tax burden, and she thought this would provide some sort of relief to eligible participants.
GRACE SHARMA: And it wasn’t passed?
EMILY DISSANAYAKE: No. So at the City Council meeting on Monday, in a 5-4 decision, the City Council rejected the pilot program, and that really sort of ended this push by Clare Kelly to provide this sort of tax relief program.
GRACE SHARMA: Isabella, if you want to take this one, what were some of the factors that went into the decisions of people choosing not to pass it?
ISABELLA KUNC: Councilmember Bobby Burns (5th) was pushing to change it to be more of a loan-based program instead of just giving them the tax relief. And I think Clare Kelly was very against changing the program up. In pushing to change the program, Burns wanted to give the Council I think until the next meeting to decide. Kelly was very against that, and so she just kind of decided to shoot down her own bill.
GRACE SHARMA: What impact does this have on current Evanston residents?
ISABELLA KUNC: Evanston is an increasingly expensive place to live, especially for — and this was kind of what the bill was targeting — was homeowners that have been here for a long time. And now property tax has gone up to a level that they can’t really afford. The point of the “Circuit Breaker” bill was to make it so that we can stop these longtime homeowners from leaving because they can’t afford the property tax. We might see more people, more longtime homeowners, leaving Evanston because they can’t afford it.
GRACE SHARMA: Emily, is there anything in the works right now with people proposing different things in the future to tackle the same issue?
EMILY DISSANAYAKE: Yes. So there’s the Strategic Housing Plan, and that is something at the City Council meeting we were at on Monday too, that’s something they decided to vote on on the May 11 meeting. That has been something that’s been working on for a while.
GRACE SHARMA: What’s the difference between what you’re talking about and what the “Circuit Breaker” program is?
ISABELLA KUNC: Housing4All is a big overall plan. It has a lot of things in it; it has creating more affordable housing. It’s kind of an overall, so it doesn’t just focus on long-term homeowners, but also focuses on trying to attract new residents, trying to make sure that people who can’t really afford housing can find some here and all that. So it does I think also have programs for not only owners, but also renters.
EMILY DISSANAYAKE: It’s also a more long-term program, because the pilot program was only supposed to be for a year, and then the Strategic Housing Plan is supposed to be for the next decade or so, supposed to really focus lowering housing costs throughout the next decade, and they also really prioritize racial equity and quality throughout Evanston.
ISABELLA KUNC: As far as we can tell, Burns had said at the end of the meeting that, since he couldn’t pass this amendment, and since the “Circuit Breaker” program was shot down, he wanted to come back next meeting with, I believe, a special order of business that he would introduce some program that would probably be more similar to what he was talking about.
GRACE SHARMA: Do you guys have any last thoughts or things you want to share about this program?
ISABELLA KUNC: I think it was a little shocking that Kelly just shot down her own idea, especially something that I feel like they put a fair bit of time and work.
GRACE SHARMA: Emily and Isabella, thank you for coming on The Weekly.
EMILY DISSANAYAKE: Thank you.
ISABELLA KUNC: Yes, this was fun.
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EMERSON LEGER: I’m here with Print Managing Editor Lexi Newsom to talk about NU’s Figure Skating Club placing 13th at Nationals in Salt Lake City. Can you take listeners through the prep that the NU Figure Skating Club had to go through to get to Nationals?
LEXI NEWSOM: A Freestyle team at NU was founded last year, and so they competed once last year, but not a complete season. So their first complete season was this year. Their first competition of the season was in October. They competed again in February, and then one more time, I’m pretty sure it was March. And then that’s when they qualified for Nationals, which was this past weekend.
Different members practice a different amount. So it really depends on their schedule. Some people practice in the morning, some in the afternoons — depends. One of the skaters I talked to — because Salt Lake City has a higher altitude — they use a mask to start training to simulate it being harder to breathe and a higher altitude than here in Evanston. Others learned completely new programs going into Nationals, which was really interesting.
There was a lot of prep behind it, but a lot of people told me that they were just so excited to make Nationals. They didn’t think they were going to place or anything. So they went into it without a lot of pressure and just to have a lot of fun. And that was kind of the idea going into it. And then, especially Low Team Maneuvers, they had a lot of success. So that was a fun surprise.
EMERSON LEGER: The team won the Low Team Maneuvers event. Can you talk about what that event is and how big of an accomplishment that was for the team to win?
LEXI NEWSOM: For team maneuvers events, generally, there are several skaters at that specific level who work together to perform different elements. So skater A might do a couple jumps, skater B might do a spin or skater C then does a step sequence, or something like that. They work together to perform a required number of elements without music. And so there are different levels — low, intermediate and high — and that’s depending on what test level you’re at.
Their Low Team Maneuvers team is made up of three people, and they’re the ones who won this weekend. And it was just a huge deal because, again, all of them were going into this being “Okay, this is a huge deal. We made it. This is our first full complete season, our first shot. So the fact that we made it is huge.”
So then to not only make it, but then win a whole event was really exciting for them. They said they were jumping on the fly, cheering up and down. So it was also a really cool team bonding moment for them. Everyone I talked to was, “Yes, this is one of the best things that happened.” You could tell, even if they weren’t on the Low Team Maneuvers team, how excited they all were that they won. It was really cool to talk to them about this.
EMERSON LEGER: Speaking on that, what did members of the team that you talked with share about attending Nationals?
LEXI NEWSOM: There were a couple of things. Skating is like a pretty tight-knit community, and so a lot of them knew other skaters on other national teams. And they said it was so cool to kind of see some of their friends again who maybe went to different schools and just overall, it was a really supportive environment, because everyone’s there supporting each other, and the team is there to support each other.
I talked to quite a few skaters with different backgrounds in skating. Some have been skating for a really long time — had made it up to national level competitions before coming to college. Others maybe didn’t make it that far, but they said sometimes they felt a lot of pressure growing up in skating when they were competing for themselves. But they said competing as a team was so much more fun and took the pressure off, and so they were able to just enjoy the weekend, which is really cool.
EMERSON LEGER: What does this result say about the future of the NU Figure Skating Club?
LEXI NEWSOM The NU Figure Skating Club is combined. They have a synchro team, and they have a freestyle team. The synchro team has been around for a minute and has competed regionally. And, for the freestyle team, one of them said, “It’s only up from here, right?”
Because they’re starting at a national level competition, which is huge. We have some really talented skaters on this team, and they were really driven to make it when they came to NU. So a lot of people are really passionate about it, and I think it’s going to give them a lot of momentum going forward and a lot of drive while still keeping a really fun atmosphere and team bonding experience.
The main thing that really stood out to me was how excited everybody was, and they went in not expecting anything. All of the wins that they had, they had three individual medals too. So they were just like, it was huge, not only that they made it, but then that it was so successful, and they were able to celebrate as a team. And I think that’s such a cool thing that all of them are so excited about.
EMERSON LEGER: Thank you, Lexi, for joining me on The Weekly.
LEXI NEWSOM: Yeah, of course. Thanks for talking.
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GRACE SHARMA: Here are the other top headlines from the week:
Beacon Academy students walk through city, protest ICE during school day
Board of Trustees Chair Peter Barris discusses University finances at Faculty Senate
Reel Thoughts: ‘Hamlet’ daringly reinvents Shakespearean classic
Northwestern signs former Northeastern, Elon guard LA Pratt in second transfer commitment of day
And Flowers, foliage and fauna: How Northwestern gets its spring makeover
From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Grace Sharma.
EMERSON LEGER: And I’m Emerson Leger.
Thank you for listening to another episode of The Weekly. This episode was reported by Grace Sharma and Emerson Leger and produced by Emerson Leger.
The audio editor is Wallis Rogin. The multimedia managing editors are Ruby Dowling, Isabella Jacob and Matt Wasilewski. The editor in chief is Anavi Prakash.
Follow us on X and Instagram @thedailynu.
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
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— City Council rejects ‘Circuit Breaker’ program, expands penalties for RLTO violations
— Northwestern Human Longevity Clinic measures gait to reveal biological age
