The healthcare singularity and the age of semantic medicine

n 1499, when portuguese explorer vasco da gama returned home after completing the first-ever sea voyage from Europe to India, he had less than half of his original crew with him— scurvy had claimed the lives of 100 of the 160 men. Throughout the Age of Discovery,1 scurvy was the leading cause of death among sailors. Ship captains typically planned for the death of as many as half of their crew during long voyages. A dietary cause for scurvy was suspected, but no one had proved it. More than a century later, on a voyage from England to India in 1601, Captain James Lancaster placed the crew of one of his four ships on a regimen of three teaspoons of lemon juice a day. By the halfway point of the trip, almost 40% of the men (110 of 278) on three of the ships had died, while on the lemon-supplied ship, every man survived [1]. The British navy responded to this discovery by repeating the experiment—146 years later. In 1747, a British navy physician named James Lind treated sailors suffering from scurvy using six randomized approaches and demonstrated that citrus reversed the symptoms. The British navy responded, 48 years later, by enacting new dietary guidelines requiring citrus, which virtually eradicated scurvy from the British fleet overnight. The British Board of Trade adopted similar dietary