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Ian Wilson

The Power List 2021


Professor of Drug Metabolism and Molecular Toxicology, Imperial College London, UK

Predictions? Realistically, I hope a lot more will be done to “democratize” analytical science. Things like microsampling at home by the patient; putting an ion mobility spectrometer on your smartphone to tell you that you have drunk too much (easy) or that you might have cancer (I’m sure there’s an app for that!); or making miniature mass and NMR spectrometers that are reliable enough to put on a GP’s desk to properly individualize medicine through metabolic phenotyping. I suggest that, if Jim Lovelock could get a mini GC-MS on a Mariner spacecraft to Mars in the 1970’s on the “Viking” mission, we should be able to get them into community medical practices in less than a decade (we will of course need the software to remove the analyst from the interpretation of the data but that is what AI is for...).

Advice? Don’t follow in my footsteps, I’m happy to get out of the way. LEAD!


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