Bionic eyes. Electroceuticals. Robot nurses. What sounds like science fiction is really an explosion of tech-driven innovations with the potential to reshape many aspects of health and medicine. From artificial intelligence to personal genomics and robotics, this widening array of digital tools will almost certainly boost diagnosticians’ accuracy and speed, improving disease detection at early stages, and thus raise the odds of a successful treatment or cure. With many of these tools likely phone-based, in the future, a selfie might just save your life.

“The dead teach the living” is a tenet of medicine. Medical students spend their first year dissecting a cadaver, whose life story they’ll never know. But suppose a virtual cadaver existed, one you could endlessly dissect, then restore to Lazarus-like intactness with a keystroke? A kind of digital avatar that could talk to medical students and help them understand how, in life, she was put together?

Susan Potter, 73, wanted to be one of those cadavers. She volunteered to be part of the Visible Human Project, and for the last 15 years of her life, she was a walking, talking pathology specimen for Dr. Victor M. Spitzer and his team. In death, she lives on, providing valuable information for medical students - and teaching compassion with her voice.

This is a story about a relationship between two living people: a scientist with a vision to create a boundary stretching, 21st century Gray’s Anatomy and a woman who volunteered for a project that would be realized only when she died. Join today ›

Around the world, researchers are creating precision tools unimaginable just a decade ago: superfast DNA sequencing, tissue engineering, cellular reprogramming, gene editing, and more. The science and technology soon will make it feasible to predict your risk of cancer, heart disease, and countless other ailments – years before you get sick. The approach holds transformative possibilities for cancer treatment and could upend the way medicine has traditionally been practiced. Rather than lump patients together under broad categories of diseases, precision medicine tailors prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to a person’s unique biochemical makeup. Join today ›

Few subjects ignite more heated debate in health circles than traditional Chinese medicine. Cultures from the Arctic to the Amazon and Siberia to the South Pacific have developed their own medicine chests of traditional cures. But China, with a record dating back to the third century B.C., offers the biggest trove for scientists to sift through. For more than 2,200 years, generations of scholars added to and refined the knowledge. The result is a canon of literature dealing with every sort of health problem, including the common cold, venereal disease, paralysis, and epilepsy. Today’s Chinese physicians are trained and licensed according to state-of-the-art medical practices, but traditional medicine remains a vibrant part of the state health care system. Most Chinese hospitals have a ward devoted to ancient cures. Join today ›

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