Editor’s Note: Noorns founder Bailey Farstad never expected to leave physics. But chronic illness changed her trajectory and, ultimately, her purpose. Her journey from laser labs to nutrigenomics counseling to building a platform for gene-based nutrition is as much about resilience as science. This is her story.
Losing Physics, Finding Purpose: My Path to Nutrigenomics
When chronic illness disrupted my life, I turned to science, and built a path to healing for others along the way.
The Making of a Scientist
I grew up in Arizona under skies so wide they seemed to press down on the desert floor. At night, the Milky Way stretched across the sky like a painted ribbon. I would lie on my back, wondering how something so vast could still be governed by rules.
I was the kid who asked too many questions at the dinner table. Why did lightning split the sky? Why did some rocks glitter while others stayed dull? Why did metal glow when it got hot? Curiosity was my default setting.
Physics gave me permission to keep asking. It turned questions into experiments, wonder into equations. At the University of Arizona, I fell in love with the rhythm of research. Late nights running simulations so powerful that they used a building’s worth of servers. Early mornings checking results. The quiet triumph when messy data finally aligned with theory.
When I earned a research fellowship in condensed matter physics at the University of Oslo, it felt like stepping into the life I had imagined for years. Norway was cold and unfamiliar, but the lab was alive with possibility. Most of my work was running simulations, trying to capture the strange behavior of magnetic fields that dance through superconductors, patterns that reminded me of Norway’s nightly auroras. I felt energized when I presented results, standing in lecture halls in front of scientists whose names I had once underlined in textbooks.
It was demanding, yes. But I thrived in that rigor. The grind was proof I belonged.
Then the virus hit…
Losing the Life I Knew
The first night, I woke up with blood coming out of my ears. The aches and pains were like nothing I had ever experienced. Parvovirus B19. For most people, it passes quickly. For me, it didn’t.
The fever left, but the fatigue stayed. My muscles ached after climbing a single flight of stairs. My concentration frayed. For a time, I even needed a wheelchair just to get through the day.
In 2005, there was no language for what I was experiencing. Today, people might compare it to “long COVID.” Back then, it was nameless. A young physicist who, without explanation, couldn’t keep up.
I tried to push through. That’s what ambitious scientists do. But physics is unforgiving. It demands focus, stamina, clarity, the very things the virus had stolen from me.
I had to walk away.
Leaving the lab was like losing gravity. Physics wasn’t just what I did; it was who I thought I was. Without it, I felt stripped bare.
For a while, I had no answer to the question that haunted me: Who am I now?
But stepping away from one identity created space for another question to take root.
Curiosity as a Lifeline
Illness didn’t erase my curiosity, it sharpened it.
If I couldn’t solve the mysteries of superconductors, I could at least ask questions about myself. What had this virus done to my body? Why hadn’t I recovered? Was there anything I could do beyond prescriptions that dulled symptoms but never gave me back my life?
I began to study again, but the subject this time was me. I read articles, textbooks, anything I could find. My training as a physicist didn’t give me answers in biology, but it gave me a framework: form a hypothesis, test it, measure, refine.
That’s how I discovered nutrigenomics, the study of how genes and lifestyle interact. At the time, it was barely a whisper outside of academia. To me, it felt like unlocking a hidden dimension of science.
Genes, I learned, aren’t destiny. They’re instructions that can be read more strongly or softly depending on signals from nutrients, sleep, stress, and movement. The blueprint is written, but the way it’s interpreted can shift.
I experimented on myself. Adjusting my diet. Tracking my energy. Looking for patterns. Some changes did nothing. Others shifted the ground beneath me. Slowly, the fog began to lift.
Progress was uneven. There were false starts, months where nothing seemed to change. But nutrigenomics gave me something I hadn’t felt since leaving physics: agency. I wasn’t just waiting for doctors to explain me. I was investigating. Acting.
Curiosity didn’t leave me. It became my lifeline. And in time, it became more than that.
From Clients to a Calling
Friends noticed first. Then they asked for help. Could I look at their genetics? Their diets? Could I make sense of the puzzle they couldn’t solve?
I hadn’t planned to become a counselor. But one kitchen-table conversation led to another. Soon, I was guiding people through the same maze I had walked, listening to their stories, interpreting their genetic results, translating science into choices they could make at breakfast or dinner.
For more than a decade, this was my work. Not in a lab, but in living rooms and coffee shops. Not lasers and microscopes, but people and their health.
It was deeply rewarding, the moment someone’s face lit up because they finally understood why they felt the way they did. But it was also limited. There are only so many hours in a day. Only one of me. But one-to-one could only go so far.
That realization forced me to think bigger. If what I had learned could change one life at a time, why not many?
The Birth of Noorns
So I reached back to the part of me that had once thrived in physics, the builder, the systems thinker.
Piece by piece, I began to assemble a gene–nutrient database. I cross-referenced papers, coded small scripts, built algorithms to spot connections. It wasn’t glamorous. Most nights it was just me, a laptop, and stacks of journals. But slowly, something began to take shape, a framework that could take raw DNA data and translate it into something human and clear.
Not a flood of vague advice, but a short list of priorities:
- Which nutrients matter most for you.
- Which forms your body is most likely to tolerate.
- Where your bottlenecks sit.
- What levers are worth trying first.
The technology wasn’t the point. It was the means to keep helping, only now, at scale.
In 2018, after years of late nights and quiet persistence, the app that would come to be called Noorns NuGen was launched.
What Noorns Stands For
The name “Noorns NuGen” comes from the Norns of Norse mythology, three sisters who wove the fate of every human. I was living in Norway when I first heard about them. The symbolism stayed with me.
Because while we can’t choose the genes we’re born with, we can influence how they’re read. Fate may hand us a blueprint, but daily choices, food, movement, sleep, stress, help weave how that blueprint is lived.
The second part, NuGen, stands for nutrigenomics: the science that helped me climb out of illness and now powers everything we do.
To me, Noorns isn’t just a company. It’s a philosophy. It’s a way of saying: you deserve tools to understand your body in plain language, without gatekeeping, without guesswork.
When someone runs one of our reports, I want them to feel what I once felt: relief at finally having context, clarity about where to start, confidence that they’re not imagining things.
Today and Tomorrow
Today, Noorns offers more than a dozen detailed DNA reports. They cover topics like methylation, fertility, anxiety, longevity, and Alzheimer’s prevention. Each is built from the same foundation I once used to guide my private clients.
The difference now is scale. Anyone with a DNA file and a desire to understand their body better can access the kind of insight that once took me hours of one-on-one counseling.
But what matters most isn’t the scale, it’s the spirit. These reports aren’t abstract products. They’re the result of years of lived experience. They carry the lessons of failure and persistence, of months in bed and hours in libraries, of conversations at kitchen tables.
They’re also rooted in a belief I’ve carried since the day I left physics: helping people is the only thing worth building for.
I still think about the younger version of myself, the physicist hunched over a lab bench in Oslo, exhausted, bewildered, not understanding why her body was failing. I want her to know: you’re not broken. You’re not alone. And someday, the questions you’re asking now will light the way for others.
This is only the beginning.
What I Carry With Me
From the desert skies of Arizona to the laser labs of Oslo, from years in a wheelchair to years rebuilding health through science, my path has been anything but straight. But every detour left me with something I carry into Noorns today: curiosity, persistence, empathy.
That’s the story behind this work. Not technology for its own sake, but a human need to make sense of our bodies, and to share what we learn along the way.
