I was born in 1953, the year Mount Everest was scaled and the double helical structure of DNA was solved. Alan Turing and Claude Shannon had already made their incredible breakthroughs in information science and theory, while computing machines were just about making a mark in public consciousness. The UNIVAC computer had successfully predicted the outcome of the US presidential elections in 1952 on television. With a sample of just 1% of the voting population, it famously predicted an Eisenhower landslide. For those of us who have worked in technology for the last seven decades, we feel extraordinarily fortunate to have witnessed and benefitted from the parallel advances in computing and molecular biology over the years. By some reasonable calculations, we can argue that computing entered the second half of the chessboard, an acceleration by a factor of 2 by 2006 some 48 years after the advent of Moore’s Law. Genome or DNA sequencing was not far behind and also made the cut, about 10 years later. It was no surprise that by 2012 that a top physician and genomics professor at the Scripps Translational Institute, Dr Eric Topol, was calling for medicine to be Schumpetered and called it a “Kairos moment in medicine.” For Dr Topol and his followers, the intellectual excitement in medicine was that we were on the verge of digitizing humans. But as Nandan and Seethalakshmi have pointed out in the lead article of this issue, the call for this digital or radical change in medicine could also come from social crises—either the spiraling costs of healthcare in some societies or the crying need for access in others. The latter is also poignantly brought out in the recent treatise “Bridgital Nation: Solving technology’s people problem” as reviewed by Professor Rudra Pratap in this issue. As Professor Ananthasuresh points out in the editorial, the idea of starting initiatives in digital health has been a topic of deep discussion for a group of us in the faculty of the Indian Institute of Science for a few seasons now. The image on the front cover of this issue was designed by Vijay Chandru* J. Indian Inst. Sci.

中文翻译：

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指数技术和数字健康的完美风暴

我出生于 1953 年，那一年珠穆朗玛峰被攀登，DNA 的双螺旋结构得到解决。艾伦·图灵和克劳德·香农已经在信息科学和理论方面取得了令人难以置信的突破，而计算机刚刚在公众意识中崭露头角。UNIVAC 计算机在电视上成功地预测了 1952 年美国总统选举的结果。凭借仅占投票人口 1% 的样本，它著名地预测了艾森豪威尔的山体滑坡。对于我们这些在过去七十年里从事技术工作的人来说，我们感到非常幸运能够见证并受益于多年来计算和分子生物学的平行进步。通过一些合理的计算，我们可以说计算进入了棋盘的后半部分，在摩尔定律问世约 48 年后，到 2006 年加速了 2 倍。基因组或 DNA 测序紧随其后，大约 10 年后也取得了成功。毫不奇怪，到 2012 年，斯克里普斯转化研究所的顶级医师和基因组学教授 Eric Topol 博士呼吁对医学进行熊彼特的研究，并将其称为“医学界的凯罗斯时刻”。对于 Topol 博士和他的追随者来说，医学界的智力兴奋在于我们正处于将人类数字化的边缘。但正如 Nandan 和 Seethalakshmi 在本期的头条文章中指出的那样，对医学数字化或根本性变革的呼吁也可能来自社会危机——一些社会医疗保健成本的飙升或其他社会迫切需要获得医疗服务. Rudra Pratap 教授在本期回顾的近期论文“Bridgital Nation：解决技术的人员问题”中也尖锐地提出了后者。正如 Ananthasuresh 教授在社论中指出的那样，启动数字健康计划的想法已经成为我们印度科学研究所教职员工几个季节深入讨论的话题。本期封面图片由 Vijay Chandru* J. Indian Inst 设计。科学。本期封面图片由 Vijay Chandru* J. Indian Inst 设计。科学。本期封面图片由 Vijay Chandru* J. Indian Inst 设计。科学。