Abstract
Over the last decade, medicine has made rapid progress. In this Agora Talk, two topics with major impact on society will be discussed:
1) Personalized precision medicine harnessing Big Data combined with informatics, and more recently with Artificial Intelligence, offers the opportunity to unravel mechanisms underlying progression to and manifestation of disease. This raises profound ethical issues, notably on the definition of the course of disease as well as its prevention/treatment to the benefit of patients.
2) The rapid progression of the Covid-19 outbreak in 2019 to a full-blown pandemic in 2020 forced the WHO to declare it a global health emergency. Till the end of Covid-19 as a global health emergency in 2023, Covid-19 had paralyzed the entire world and led to a marked increase in global national debt levels. Information about what we could have learned as well as which opportunities had been missed will be discussed.
