It will be second nature to the engineering mindset that digital twins, as Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield point out in their introduction to ‘Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life’ (Princeton University Press, £25, ISBN 9780691223278) “have been used to help create wind turbines, oil rigs, cars, jet engines, aircraft, spacecraft and more besides.”
What might not be so obvious is that, thanks to the data revolution in biology, digital twins are successfully operating in the field of medicine. The reason for this assumption, says Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan in his foreword to this immensely thought-provoking book, is that while we’re used to thinking of physics and chemistry as disciplines which lend themselves to predictive simulations, biology sits in our mindset as “largely observational and empirical.”
Maybe it’s too soon to get excited about having individualised virtual twins of our entire...