Inside the shell of one ’ s skin, there is far more DNA that is nonhuman than DNA that is human. You, the skin bag, are all too less human than human. Even to the extent that your individual corporeal machine is to be taken as the base unit of medical analysis and political subjectivity, it is already a multispecies arrangement. Smarr ’ s broader intellectual project for the systemic establishment of digital medicine envisions the coembodiment of information at the scale of 7 billion humans and zillions of genes, environmentally bound molecules, proteins, and microbes, all contributing to a comprehensive diagnostic simulation and treatment metabiopolitics, a universal biocomputation intersecting with the universal ecocomputation that Griffith ’ s demonstration popularizes. As a research model, it draws an explosion of traditional, individuated patient models into pluralized platforms in which every User ’ s genomic, nutritional, neuronal, microbial, and environmental data would be systematically aggregated into an information commons where new kinds of analysis and pattern recognition could mature. The thickened interrelations of intrinsic and extrinsic force further dissolve the individuation of the singular patient toward alternative, as yet unnamed patterns of biological plasticity. The tracing of pathologies across multiple biological scales, over time and over multiple populations at such comprehensive scope and granular detail, would surely also reform basic concepts of “ disease, ” from one recognizing swatches of individuated symptoms toward one governing nuanced economies of symbiotic infection, transfer, and immunization across multiple host sites, and smart enough to see some contamination as enabling health, not preventing it. <sup>27</sup> In time we see projects designing artificial intelligence systems that could interpret the exabytes of real time and archived data and produce interpretive causal models, images of emergent patterns, that startle diagnosticians and patients alike. This hyperilluminated medicine would surely show that causality and pathology zigzag from microbe to bioregions and back again in utterly surprising ways, and that today ’ s folk conceptions of organ, body, group, and toxin demand more rational recategorizations (and Addresses), likely ones that will appear as self-evident when revealed but that today we can scarcely anticipate. <sup>28</sup> In parallel, the various technologies and concepts gathered under the rubric of synthetic biology can engage this absolutized commons as an open-ended toolkit for biological refashioning (if it is actually held in common) and in doing so bring its own controversies and contradictions. Further, in the institutional transference of tracking, diagnosis, and treatment expertise toward the tracing of super- and subindividual forces by computational infrastructures, and away from the one-on-one observation and interviewing of individual persons, the necessary role and proficiencies of “ doctors ” would evolve as well. While the expert arts of high-touch treatment don ’ t abdicate their positions, the computational support of pattern recognition and robotic support of therapeutic abscission do alter how health is provided, just as they alter what health is and make very different demands on those trained to do the providing.
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