Imagine a future where science has created your twin. Not a flesh-and-blood twin, but one that recreates your flesh and blood, your bones, your heart, your brain — your whole body, in fact — as an extremely complicated computer model.
Your doctors can use this digital twin to work out how you will respond to a particular drug or medical procedure. They can even look further into the future, creating a " healthcast" , to forecast what diseases might happen to you or how your lifestyle will affect your health as you age. It is the ultimate in personalized medicine. This is the bold vision set out in Virtual You: How building your digital twin will revolutionize medicine and change your life by Peter Coveney, director of the Centre for Computational Science, and Roger Highfield, science director of the Science Museum Group, UK.
Digital twins are already in widespread use in industries such as civil engineering. But these model systems are much simpler than the complex human body. Imagine all the parts that come together to make you work: from the 3 billion letters of your genome (基因组), the numerous molecules (分子) that make up your cells, the trillions of cells building your tissues and organs, and the environment having its input too. Now, imagine trying to create a model of this that is made to each unique individual and that predicts the changes that will take place over a lifetime. This is easier said than done. Changes in the systems biologists want to describe are usually different from what mathematicians describe as " non-linear" (非线性的). Another complication is " emergence" : where the whole of a system is greater than the sum of its parts. This complexity challenges mathematics and pushes computing to the limit too.
But getting to the next level — a whole human individual — is going to require yet more data and a revolution in computing technology far beyond what is currently possible. Whether we will get there is an open question, but Virtual You shows us what scientists from different fields can achieve when they all work together.
