‘Virtual You: fighting the next pandemic with digital twins’ debate
On Wednesday 29 March 2023, the Science Museum played host to a panel debate on ‘Virtual You: fighting the next pandemic with digital twins’ examining how to make medicine truly predictive and personalized for the first time by building “digital twins” of patients – which not only look like them but behave like them. The emerging technology of digital twins is explored in ‘Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life’, the third book by Science Museum Science Director Roger Highfield and Professor Peter Coveney of University College London. In this very special event to launch the book, the authors are joined by a panel of experts working at the frontiers of this new science.
Speakers included:
Professor Andrea Townsend-Nicholson—Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at University College London.
Professor Blanca Rodriguez—Professor of Computational Medicine at the University of Oxford; Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Basic Biomedical Sciences.
Dr Jazmin Aguado-Sierra—Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
Samira Ahmed (Chair)—Award-winning journalist and broadcaster.
Professor Peter Coveney—Professor of Physical Chemistry, Honorary Professor of Computer Science, Director of the Centre for Computational Science and Associate Director of the Advanced Research Computing Centre at University College London; Professor of Applied High Performance Computing at University of Amsterdam; Professor Adjunct at the Yale School of Medicine, Yale University; Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Member of Academia Europaea.
Dr Roger Highfield—Science Director at the Science Museum; visiting professor at the Dunn School, Oxford and UCL Department of Chemistry; member of the UKRI-Medical Research Council.
The event also featured the launch of a new film, created by the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, showing the potential of digital twins in fighting the next pandemic, to celebrate the museum’s COVID vaccine exhibition, Injecting Hope. The panel discussed topics from responsible AI, limitations of current super computer technologies and the opportunities and challenges in creating a digital twin version of the human body.
Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life
Virtual You is a panoramic account of efforts by scientists around the world to build digital twins of human beings, from cells and tissues to organs and whole bodies. These virtual copies will usher in a new era of personalized medicine, one in which your digital twin can help predict your risk of disease, participate in virtual drug trials, shed light on the diet and lifestyle changes that are best for you, and help identify therapies to enhance your well-being and extend your lifespan—but thorny challenges remain.
In this deeply illuminating book, Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield reveal what it will take to build a virtual, functional copy of a person in five steps. Along the way, they take you on a fantastic voyage through the complexity of the human body, describing the latest scientific and technological advances—from multiscale modeling to extraordinary new forms of computing—that will make “virtual you” a reality, while also considering the ethical questions inherent to realizing truly predictive medicine.
Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life
by Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield
Publisher : Princeton University Press (28 March 2023)
Language : English
Hardcover : 312 pages
ASIN : B0BGX45X1K
ISBN-10 : 0691223270
Guide Price: £16.25 – Kindle Edition | £21.53 – Hardcover
Click to buy Kindle Edition | Hardcover Edition
With an incisive foreword by Nobel Prize–winning biologist Venki Ramakrishnan, Virtual You is science at its most astounding, showing how our virtual twins and even whole populations of virtual humans promise to transform our health and our lives in the coming decades.
