Much ink has been spilled on the huge leaps in communications, social networking, and commerce that have resulted from impressive gains in IT and processing power over the last 30 years. However, relatively little has been said about how computing power is about to impact our lives in the biggest way yet: Health. Two things are happening in parallel: technology to collect biological data is taking off and computing is becoming massively scalable. The combination of the two is about to revolutionize health care.
Understanding disease and how to treat it requires a deep knowledge of human biology and what goes wrong in diseased cells. Up until now this has meant that scientists do experiments, read papers, and go to seminars to get data to build models of both normal and diseased cell states. However, medical research is about to go through a tectonic shift made possible by new technological breakthroughs that have made data collection much more scalable. Large amounts of data combined with computers mean that researchers will have access to data beyond just what they can themselves collect or remember. A world with affordable massive data in the clinic and in the lab is on the horizon. This will mean exponentially faster medical progress.