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鈥攂ut thorny challenges also 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 鈥渧irtual you鈥� a reality, while also considering the ethical questions inherent to realizing truly predictive medicine.
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.
Awards and Recognition
- A Financial Times Best Summer Book
- A Financial Times Best Book of the Year: Science
Peter Coveney is director of the Centre for Computational Science at University College London, professor at the Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, and professor adjunct at the Yale School of Medicine. Roger Highfield is science director at the Science Museum Group, a member of the Medical Research Council, and visiting professor at University College London and the Dunn School, University of Oxford. They are the authors of Frontiers of Complexity and The Arrow of Time. Quentin Cooper is a radio and television presenter, audiobook narrator, event host, trainer, and lecturer in communication and journalism. He is the narrator of Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth and Facing Our Futures by Nikolas Badminton, among other audiobooks.
鈥淭his timely and highly informative book should be a thought provoker for a large and diverse readership, including the future research leaders and pioneers that will drive this field forward.鈥濃�擬ark Girolami, University of Cambridge and The Alan Turing Institute
鈥�Virtual You provides a dazzling guide to the frontiers of modern science, from the limits of mathematics, AI, and algorithms to the latest in genetics, deep learning, and quantum computing, to show how digital twins of people will herald a new era of medicine, one that is truly personalized and predictive.鈥濃�擥eorge Em Karniadakis, Brown University
鈥�Virtual You gives a fascinating and accessible overview of the many global collaborative efforts to create a digital twin of a human being, and looks toward a future where the vision of P4 medicine鈥攑redictive, personalized, preventive, and participatory鈥攈as become a reality.鈥濃�擳ony Hey, coauthor of The New Quantum Universe
鈥淏eing able to use an individual鈥檚 medical and fitness tracker data to make 鈥榟ealthcasts鈥� is a game changer. I can鈥檛 wait to see my own virtual human come to digital life!鈥濃�擜ndrea Townsend-Nicholson, University College London
鈥淭his stimulating and balanced book argues that biology is both a chemical and informational science, and that building informational models will be critical for the future progress of biology and medicine. This clear, readable account from Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield shows how digital models not only inform how life works, but also how this knowledge can be used to transform how we treat human disease.鈥濃�擯aul Nurse, Nobel Laureate and Director of the Francis Crick Institute
鈥淭he human body is a collection of seven octillion atoms (seven followed by twenty-seven zeros), and if we could simulate their life dance in a computer, we could make predictions about our health. In this visionary book, Coveney and Highfield show how this dream may come true, revealing the science of complexity at its zenith. A must-read for anyone who is curious about the coming revolution in predictive medicine.鈥濃�擲auro Succi, Italian Institute of Technology
