The Wisdom of the Crowds Shaping Modern Medical Research
The article “UK Biobank Data on 500,000 People Paves Way to Precision Medicine” describes how the United Kingdom is using the wisdom of the crowds approach to customize medical treatments for people across the nation. In order to do this, the United Kingdom established a platform named the UK Biobank, where invited individuals could report on the different elements to treatments they have received in the past, such as their previous health information, the results of the treatment, and the illness that led to their need for treatment. Until now, they have received information from 500,000 people, and their goal for the next step in this project is to increase this number to 1 million, and with this expansion to diversify the types of people who volunteer their data. The United Kingdom’s reasoning behind establishing such a system is that they want to provide a database for researchers, doctors, and eventually, the general public, to be able to have quick access to reliable data about all types of diseases. This is especially beneficial for rare diseases that potentially do not have enough public data on them. This is because the Biobank provides individuals with access to real information, that although not found in a research study, is still reliable and applicable. Therefore, this platform is predicted to lead to great benefits for the future of medicine, as it is an efficient way to grant individuals access to information that is usually not readily available and can provide insight into the success of treatments for a plethora of diseases.
In lecture, we discussed the wisdom of the crowds. This principle explains how the opinion or data of a large group, when aggregated, can be more valuable than the opinion of an individual expert. The article discusses how this wisdom of the crowd principle is the future of modern medical research. This database gives doctors and researchers access to hundreds of thousands of individuals’ results on treatments that have been aggregated and filtered to be easily sorted to see which treatment could be the most beneficial for each type of illness. This process of mass data collection and of data aggregation will result in more specialized treatment in the future, since doctors and researchers can analyze the symptoms of their patients and develop a tailored solution given people who have been in similar circumstances. Therefore, this article demonstrates an application of the wisdom of the crowd and how it can be used to improve individuals’ lives by creating access to valuable and reliable research through data aggregation.