Taken together, the marriage of biology and silicon and the
shift from species-based to individualized therapy will change
the face of medicine forever. Traditional human efforts to treat
disease are being empowered with digital tools that annotate
life with silicon technology. The enormous material effort to
find symptoms is being replaced by a combined genetic and
artificial intelligence that knows where to look and how to find
problems before we do. In the new medical paradigm, disease will
be diagnosed before it is made fully manifest. Highly targeted
drugs will be used to intervene before organs are ravaged or
tissue is destroyed. This new ability to diagnose and treat
certain diseases early, from infectious agents like hepatitis C
to degenerative ailments such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,
may obviate the need for the types of tissue, organ, or stem
cell therapies that often attract the most public attention. In
the future, a supercomputer sitting in an air-conditioned room
will work day and night, cr