So I’m hard at work on my novel, a big sci-fi story about AI and humanity in the future. I’m working on my reading list including a couple of books by Glyn Moody; one on the Internet – rebel code: inside linux and the open source revolution and another on bioinformatics – Digital Code of Life. The list is long but I’m also doing a bit of off-list reading and research and sometimes I get sidetracked. Sometimes the sidetracks are very interesting.

A long time ago I read a book that was somewhat critical of medical doctors who never studied nutrition and whose approach to medicine was through sickness rather than health. The writer advocated for a medical education that focused on the healthy body, one that produced doctors who understood how best to achieve and maintain health, of mind and body. Now it seems all that is finally changing.

At Google’s Verily they want us to

Imagine a chemist and an engineer and a doctor and a behavioral scientist, all working together to truly understand health and to better prevent, detect, and manage disease. Picture a world in which technology and life sciences are not distinct, but partners with a united mission …

to figure out what makes a person healthy and whether there is a genetic disposition to good health. But application of the genetic principle can be confusing.

For example, a group of researchers led by Stephen Friend, president of Sage Bionetworks and Eric Schadt of Mt Sinai have been looking at a curious anomaly  which found people whose genetic profile indicated that they should be very ill but whose medical records documented their perfect health.

We’ll see how this all turns out.

I’m not ready to talk too much about the book I’m working on; it’s still early days in a long journey. Well not too long I hope. Anyway, it’s about the creation of the first hypercomputer, which I’ll define here as a machine that is non-algorithmic. And this when some scientists are searching for the algorithm of life. What a depressing thought.