Been There, Done That by Rachel Feltman

FORTHCOMING TITLES

A bold manifesto based on new thinking that marks the return of the successful writing partnership behind the two influential bestsellers THE ARROW OF TIME: A Voyage to Solve Time’s Greatest Mystery and FRONTIERS OF COMPLEXITY: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World.

A new kind of human is under development: your digital twin. Although confined to a virtual world, this digital copy of yourself will greatly influence your life in the real world as your personal crashtest dummy, guinea pig and drug-trial volunteer all rolled into one.

Virtual heart cells are already helping to replace animals in testing cardiac medicines. Virtual drug trials using supercomputers are enabling doctors to work out which treatments work best for an individual patient. Digital twins are being used by surgeons in planning operations to treat brain aneurisms, by medical device companies when designing the next generation of implant and by pharmaceutical companies for ensuring particles of an inhaled drug reach their target. And populations of digital twins are being used to understand the social, economic and environmental factors that affect health.

In VIRTUAL YOU, Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield provide the first popular account of revolutionary efforts to build virtual cells, organs, whole bodies and populations. As well as heralding the dawn of truly personalized medicine, predicting, say, what a change in diet and lifestyle could do to an individual’s health and lifespan, our digital doppelgängers will raise new ethical and philosophical dilemmas and make us think anew about what it means to be ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ – and in doing so force us to reconsider many aspects of life that we take for granted.

In taking readers on this ultimate voyage of self-discovery, VIRTUAL YOU provides a glimpse of the remarkable power of next-generation medicine while touching on some of the deepest problems in biology, mathematics and computing.

PETER COVENEY holds professorships at University College London (where he is director of the Centre for Computational Science), University of Amsterdam and Yale University School of Medicine. VIRTUAL YOU draws on his lead role in a major EU project to simulate the human body – and search for drugs to treat covid-19 and more – using some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, as well as his research into the frontiers of computation and modelling.

ROGER HIGHFIELD is the science director of the UK’s Science Museum Group, which consists of five museums visited by more than five million people annually. He is also a member of the Medical Research Council and a visiting professor of public engagement at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, and the Department of Chemistry, University College London. Together with Peter, he has organized major public events on quantum computing and virtual humans and written papers on the limitations of big data without big theory.

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: Princeton University Press Publication: Autumn 2022 Status: Draft manuscript Length: 75,000 words

All rights available excluding World English Language (Princeton University Press)