Panning out from the nerve centers of medicine – Boston, San Francisco, Rochester, San Diego, Houston, Baltimore, Paris, Lyon, Munich, Hanover, Zurich, Stockholm – one observes the now millions upon millions of individuals working in the pursuit of medicine: medicine as treatment, medicine as science, medicine as business, medicine as discovery. In fact, at no point in modern times has the burst of scientific and technological discovery, innovation and creativity in medicine been greater. Beyond the great ages of Galen, Avicenna and even the Enlightenment, medicine has grown to the very center of the scientific drive of the modern civilization.

Medicine stands today at a threshold which is analogous to that at which the microelectronics and telecommunications industries stood twenty years ago. The scientific base upon which the medical technological revolution is being built is now in the process of being discovered and elucidated.

Medicine as practiced today will appear in a very short period to have been archaic as a result of the convergence of discoveries occurring in universities, research institutes, biomedical companies, traditional pharmaceutical houses and medical technology companies.

Genetics, diagnostic imaging, proteomics, spare-parts surgery, cloning, tissue engineering, each field will, in the coming thirty years, explode into new therapies which will profoundly affect the way the human body is treated and the way human beings conceive of their own biological reality and its associated expectations.

The conventional wisdom states that ultimately all diseases will be amenable to either prevention or cure as a result of the ever-growing understanding of the fundamental structure of living organisms and the ways in which specifically to control the forces of nature at a molecular and micro-molecular level.

In fact, the understanding of disease will evolve beyond its current boundaries and revolutionize not only the process of aging and the prevention of disease but also the entire role of the public health sector in managing these changes. New issues will arise that affect the individual, families, nations and the civilization as a whole as what was once considered pre-ordained will become not only preventable but also reversible. While not the central focus of the programs, the ethical implications will play a significant role in directing the use of these discoveries.

Historically, medicine and medical innovation have been segmented into the traditional fields of imaging, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, therapeutics, basic and applied research, and teaching. This series will stand at the doorstep to the coming era when each of these fields will be realigned and subsumed under the converging societal drive towards better medicine.

The project is structured as a co-production between the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Television Dept., Youth + Education (on behalf of a number of European Public Broadcasters TBA) the Global Medical Forum Foundation (GMF) and the European Medical Network of Zurich.