Health
The future of health is difficult to predict in many ways. With the looming spectre of climate change, the world stopping global pandemic caused by COVID-19, and the first sighting of declining life expectancies among portions of American society due to rampant obesity and opioid abuse, it is strange to think that despite this global health is improving more quickly than ever before. Developments in genomics bring new possibilities of wiping out previously unstoppable genetic diseases, but also add new ethical questions and worrying implications about so-called “designer babies” and what it truly means to be human. Mobile health will enable more people than ever to gain access to healthcare regardless of income or geography, yet many in even the most wealthy nations still lack proper healthcare support. The contradictory nature of major trends in the future of health makes formulating concrete predictions of what health will look like in coming years extremely difficult, but these interviews highlight scientists who continue to try to both understand and improve human health in the face of these challenges.
Topics
- genomics
- COVID-19
- epidemiology
- population genetics
- scientific method
- medical ethics
- medicine
- global health
- health
- human genome
- uncertainty
- prediction