What do the words “artificial intelligence” evoke for you? Hopes? Fears? A shiny, personalised future with a place for everyone? A dystopian landscape, peppered with fallen drones and unemployed masses? Or perhaps the term evokes nothing more than the world we already live in
Genes influence every aspect of a person’s health, from the ability to resist infection with a pathogen, to how medication is metabolised, to mental health and behaviour. Diseases have historically been defined by what a clinician sees, rather than the root cause of the pathology. In rare diseases, we know that genetic defects affecting different components of the same biological pathway can produce very similar clinical problems. However, understanding the factors contributing to common disorders is considerably more complex
A 300% increase in three years; from 200 million in 2017 to 626 million in 2020. This astounding number is the most recent prediction for the total number of surveillance cameras across China (Qiang, 2019). Close to a single camera per 2,000 inhabitants, all fully networked to form the Skynet project — perhaps an awkward name, as Skynet in The Terminator movies attempted to exterminate humanity
There are many different ways that faults in the genetic code can occur. Alterations to the genetic code can arise at any level and can affect gene expression leading to human disease. Before reading this chapter, readers might want to remind themselves of some of the terminology that is used to describe the genes and how they are assembled, by looking back at the introductory chapter, Chapter 1. There are many ways in which the genetic code, from the level of the chromosome (the bundles of genes in our cells), right down to a single nucleotide (the individual building blocks that make up our genes), can be disrupted