Virtual You - by Peter Coveney & Roger Highfield

Book Synopsis

The visionary science behind the digital human twins that will enhance our health and our future

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.

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.

Review Quotes

"Virtual You is the most comprehensive and comprehensible account so far of the way in which the revolution in computing and data is starting to transform human biology and medicine."---Clive Cookson, Financial Times

"Virtual You's scope is as epic as its vision, taking us through medical history from Vesalius to Venter, and from the Antikythera mechanism to supercomputers and beyond. This means the concepts come at you thick and fast, although as a non-mathematician, I found the explanations refreshingly clear."---Claire Ainsworth, New Scientist

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Computer simulations are coming to play a leading role in many fields of science. Science writer Highfield and computer scientist Coveney show in vivid examples how medical researchers are creating digital twins of individual patients and then using these virtual humans to guide treatments for a wide range of diseases.

"---Clive Cookson, Financial Times

"[An] immensely thought-provoking book."---Nick Smith, Engineering and Technology

"A Financial Times Best Book of the Year: Science"

"A Financial Times Best Summer Book"

"Wide-ranging investigation into efforts by scientists to create digitised "twins" of human beings that promise a future of predictive medicine, but also ethical challenges."-- "Financial Times"

About the Author

Peter Coveney is 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 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.