Scientists are now building “digital twins” of patients—which not only look like them but behave like them—to make medicine truly predictive and personalised for the first time.
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 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.
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.
The event also features 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.
Signed copies of ‘Virtual You’ are available at a reduced price with the purchase of a ticket—or you can choose to purchase a ticket, without the book, to hear from a fascinating panel of speakers.
Speakers include:
- 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.
- Peter Coveney—director of the Centre for Computational Science at University College London, professor at the Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, and adjunct professor at the Yale School of Medicine.
- Roger Highfield—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.