Barry Robson & O. K. Baek 
The Engines of Hippocrates 
From the Dawn of Medicine to Medical and Pharmaceutical Informatics

A unique, integrative look at information-based medicine

The convergence of medical science, biology, pharmacology,
biomedical engineering, healthcare, and information technology is
revolutionizing medical and scientific practice, and has broader
social implications still being understood. The Engines of
Hippocrates provides a unique, integrative, and holistic look
at the new paradigm of information-based medicine, covering a broad
range of topics for a wide readership.

The authors take a comprehensive approach, examining the
prehistory, history, and future of medicine and medical technology
and its relation to information; how history led to such
present-day discoveries as the structure of DNA, the human genome,
and the discipline of bioinformatics; and what the future results
of these discoveries may hold. Their far-ranging views are their
own and not necessarily those of the IBM Corporation or other
employers.

The Engines of Hippocrates helps readers understand:

* Forces shaping the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries
today, including personalized medicine, genomics, data mining, and
bionanotechnology

* The relationship between pharmaceutical science today and other
disciplines such as philosophy of health, history, economics,
mathematics, and computer science

* The integrated role alternative and non-Western medicines could
play in a new, information-based medicine

* Practical, ethical, organizational, technological, and social
problems of information-based medicine, along with a novel
data-centric computing model and a self-adaptive software
engineering model, and corresponding information technology
architectures, including perspectives on sharing remote data
efficiently and securely for the common good

An unmatched, cross-disciplinary perspective on the big picture
of today and tomorrow’s medicine, The Engines of Hippocrates
provides a reference to interested readers both inside and outside
the pharmaceutical and medical communities, as well as a peerless
classroom supplement to students in a wide variety of
disciplines.

Table of Content

Preface.

About the Authors.

1 A Short Preview of Mankind, Medicine, Molecules, and
Machines.

2 From Prehistory to Hippocrates.

3 The Road to the New Medicine.

4 The Imminent Challenge: Medicine as an Industry.

5 The Next Decade: Personalized Medicine and the Digital Patient
Record.

6 Enforcing your Rights: Medical Ethics, Consent, Privacy, and
IT.

7 Holistic Medicine and IT.

8 Architecting It All.

9 Guardian Angels: Knowing Our Molecules, Drug and Vaccine
Design, Medical Decision Support, Medical Vigilance and
Defense.

10 What Next? At One with the Engines of Hippocrates.

Glossary.

Clinical Trial Terms.

Notes, Bibliography, and Further Reading Guide.

Index.

About the author

BARRY ROBSON is Director of Medical Research and Professor
of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Evidence Based Medicine at St.
Matthew’s University School of Medicine, and CEO of The Dirac
Foundation, formed with the permission of Nobel laureate Paul A. M.
Dirac’s widow to promote understanding of the value of theoretical
physics in human and veterinary medicine. Until recently, he was
Chief Scientific Officer of IBM Global Healthcare and Life
Sciences, and then Global Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences, an IBM
Distinguished Engineer, and previously, Strategic Advisor at IBM
Research headquarters.

O. K. BAEK is a Senior Solutions Architect at IBM,
specializing in healthcare and with a passionate interest in the
benefits and long-standing logic of Oriental medicine. He is
particularly interested in the development of novel architectures
for sharing and using medical information securely, and in
translational research, the matter of rapidly delivering the
results of medical research and genomics to enhance everyday
clinical decisions.