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.

"This book describes the revolutionary efforts underway to build virtual humans - from cells and organs to whole bodies and populations. Virtual human technology has extraordinary potential, but also poses enormous computational challenges. Digital doppelgèangers of patients will be able to usher in an era of truly personalized medicine, in which virtual drug trials can be conducted on thousands of digital twins, and "health-casts" can give you an idea of what a change in diet and lifestyle would really mean for you. Your "virtual you" will change your healthcare and potentially extend your lifespan (while also raising philosophical and ethical questions). However, numerous challenges and problems need to be solved to build such virtual versions of humans and to make truly personalized and predictive medicine possible. These challenges largely reside in the domains of the computer and physical sciences, and they are the real focus of this book. Building a "virtual you" touches on a wide range of deep scientific issues: how detailed the models need to be; what is currently possible to model; the problems inherent to simulating chaos and complexity; how to stitch together different kinds of mathematical models; the need for the realization of new forms of computing, such as quantum computation; and how all this relates to the limits of what we can simulate digitally and the future of computer modeling. The book ends on a provocative note, claiming that although we will be able to go far with next generation exascale and quantum computers, we will need to return to the technology of analog machines in order to simulate the complexity of the human body and perhaps harness the properties of special metamaterials to solve equations by manipulating beams of light"--

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.