For Andrew Morris, being appointed president of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences this spring came “at a particularly exciting time for medical research”. In his view, “the breadth of new technologies emerging is just remarkable.”
From genomics to gene editing, stem cells to virology, immunology to neurotechnology, scientific papers are pouring out of the world’s biomedical labs more rapidly than ever. At the same time, insights are emerging from the analysis of multiple sources of health data, from clinical trials to patient records and social and environmental statistics — enhanced with the addition of artificial intelligence.
“The fusion of biology with computational science, social science and medical science means that we have a whole generation of new tools coming down the track,” says Morris, who is professor of medicine at Edinburgh university and director of Health Data Research UK. “If we get this right, it could be one of those inflection points in medicine as important as the discovery of antibiotics.”