Virtual You

“A Financial Times Best Summer Book”“A Financial Times Best Book of the Year: Science”“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 *“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”[An] immensely thought-provoking book.”—Nick Smith, Engineering and Technology“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“

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.

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.