Health of the UK population in 2040.

www.thelancet.com Vol 386 August 15, 2015 643 Looking into the future often creates a mixture of uncertainty and anticipation. Science fi ction is fi lled with stories of doom and excitement about discoveries yet to be made. The UK Academy of Medical Sciences is exploring what the main health challenges for the UK population will be in 2040, and identifying opportunities to address them. To coincide with the launch of this project in November, 2014, The Lancet asked readers “What do you think will be the three biggest issues for the health of the UK population in 2040?” We received a host of responses from doctors, medical students, professors, and policy makers with ideas that ranged from the expected to pure science fi ction. All respondents were united in their certainty about change, and the idea that to some extent these changes were predictable: the rise in obesity and non-communicable diseases, the demands of an ageing population, and the emergence of antibiotic resistance. Many writers imagined the development of new technologies and told us about smart contact lenses that would plague the wearer with sponsored adverts, individual telemonitoring that would replace general practitioners, or a dystopian National Health Service in which a laser-eyed coordinator moves patients like troops around England from their “war room”. 25 years ago mobile phones and the internet were in their infancy. Their expansion might have been a predictable technological development but the human response was perhaps unforeseeable. The way these technologies have made the world smaller and faster, and their eff ects on the people living in it, could not have been predicted. We can speculate on the problems posed by antibiotic resistance, climate change, and the resultant changes in patterns of infectious disease, but the course these events will take is largely infl uenced by the human reaction to these situations, of which we are all a part. At The Lancet we look forward to another 25 years of reporting on the most exciting developments in medical science, collecting evidence for policy decisions, and advocating for human health. The Lancet editors enjoyed every mini-essay and would like to thank all those who sent submissions. All the responses are published online at The Lancet’s Health of the UK Population in 2040 webpage. We have selected three pieces for publication in print and congratulate Pieter van de Graaf, Emma Hopkins, and Martin O’Flaherty.