Seven and a half million years of calculation were needed by the supercomputer “Deep Thought” to find “42” as the answer to “life, the universe, and everything”. And it took another 10 million years to find the question which would give the answer meaning. Unfortunately, a consortium of psychiatrists, who feared for the loss of their careers when the meaning of life became known, subverted this process 5 minutes before its end. That was in 1978 (Douglas Adams). But by 2045 the exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence will lead to a technological Singularity, when machine intelligence will be billions of times more powerful than all human intelligence combined (Ray Kurzweil).

In the meantime, IBM’s super computer Watson has been programmed with 600,000 pieces of medical evidence from over two million pages of medical text as well as the entire English version of Wikipedia all stored in 15 terabytes of RAM (15 trillion bytes of memory). And in silico medicine and the global virtual physiological human (VPH) community are set to “revolutionise” healthcare by integrating ideas (paradigms – Thomas Kuhn), tools (Peter Galison), big data, HPC. The presentation will explore and critically reflect these developments and their potential to indeed help our health systems to eventually progress towards a more predictive, personalised, integrated medicine. This has been a dream of public health actors already 60 years ago, and it will need interventions and policy measures beyond big data analytics to realise it.