“The biological revolution will accelerate”
THE FUTURIST: BOGI ELIASEN. Faroese-born Bogi Eliasen is bridging different fields in pursuit of a new health paradigm that will encompass individuals, data, and businesses. We talked with the Director of Health at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies (CIFS) about how his pioneering genome project in his native country launched his CIFS career, about his Covid-19 insights, and about future developments that inspire his optimism.
“The biological revolution will accelerate with deeper and deeper insights, learning and applications”
Despite hailing from the remote North Atlantic archipelago of the Faroe Islands, Bogi Eliasen, Director of Health at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies (CIFS) has an outlook that is anything but isolationist. Besides having lived in several places worldwide and being married to a Peruvian woman, he has a global vision for a holistic, data-driven and personalized health paradigm. It is a vision that challenges the ‘10/90’ gap he described in a column in the last issue of Scenario, where he addressed the immediate need to improve the well-being of others besides the wealthiest 10 per cent and shift the focus towards disease prevention rather than treatment. In this interview, we talked about how he joined CIFS, the factors that will impact future development, and, of course, Covid-19.
Bogi Eliasen studied Political Science and International Law at the University of Aarhus, Denmark and was initially employed by Faroe Business Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, after which he hosted an international affairs radio magazine for four years, and for the past 20 years he has worked as a consultant for various politicians, public sector bodies and private companies. As part of his global health ambitions, he has taken on numerous chairperson positions and critical roles in various networks globally, spanning the fields of personal and public health.
In 2009 he took the lead in the pioneering work to establish FarGen, the first population genome project to sequence the genomes of the entire population of the Faroe Islands. The project also paved the way for his involvement with CIFS in 2014, in which he became an associated partner.
“I was looking for a platform to work in a cross-disciplinary manner to develop the emerging health paradigm, with a special focus on genomics, when a friend told me about CIFS. I called the Director and told him why CIFS needed me. He agreed and that’s where it began. At the time, I was working in my native Faroe Islands with the FarGen programme and had slowly come to realize that genomics could benefit people and populations in many more ways in science and health applications. I found that it was imperative to look years and decades ahead, and to identify where to start building the ecosystem,” says the Director of Health, who received the prestigious HIMSS Global Achievement Award in 2019 for his work in linking the fields of genomics and digital health.
In addition to managing his much-valued health team at CIFS, his work there entails networking, responding to client needs and creating bridges between different stakeholders in the pursuit of realizing the new health paradigm and delivering on CIFS’s raison d’être: to work for the betterment of society. He is a knowledge broker, always following the latest scientific and technological developments, but keeping his eyes firmly fixed on applicability. “While I can and I do babble about amazing basic science, my core strength is to see and enable the use of tech and knowledge to improve and benefit society. I spend a lot of time learning about different parts of biology, data, digital functions, new materials, and new health opportunities, including reimbursement models and Universal Health Coverage. International politics is also a hobby that I also use in my work,” he says.
While he has worked on many important projects, one of the most impactful, he tells me, was the Danish Health 2030 project initiated in 2017, as this marked the beginning of a continuum of building multi-stakeholder directional processes to address the flaws of the current health paradigm. “This led to the foundation of Nordic Health in 2019 and El Movimiento Salud Latin America 2030 in 2020, which works to improve health in South America, as well as a pilot project in Peru, and now the Canada Health 2030 process in 2021. While the insights gained from these projects form a core part of building the Future Proofing Index project to provide data-driven decisions, they are also fundamental pillars in shaping and framing the emerging health paradigm. And they also serve as reference points for the Nordic Council in health matters.”
Since Bogi Eliasen is a health expert, it is impossible to avoid talking about the Covid-19 crisis, which has obviously highlighted and even worsened many of the problems he addresses in his work. But the situation has also revealed that nations are not capable of delivering on health issues when it is really needed, he tells me, adding: “Despite the terrible crisis, I hope Covid-19 will establish better global health cooperation that will be driven by strong individuals, organizations and companies, not countries. It has become clear that other actors lead the development, while nations just tag along and close the gaps as they appear. But we have the technology to do so much better for all, not just the wealthiest in the world, so I remain optimistic.”
Despite this optimism, something else is worrying Bogi Eliasen: the possibility that we will not be able to find a way to combine the typical, geographically bound social contract with our new digital reality. “I fear that we are unable to establish a new digital social contract that helps us to harvest the benefits of digital tech without destroying both our personal lives and democracies,” he says, and continues: “As we become more digital, we are simultaneously geographically and non-geographically bound, and right now, we lack the framework to properly deal with this new world. That to me is the prerequisite for getting things to run smoothly in our society.”
Looking to the future, he believes two developments will impact our perception of not only health but also society at large: genomics and systems thinking. “The biological revolution that took off with the Human Genome Project in the 1990s will accelerate with deeper and deeper insights, learning and applications. Not just for the benefit of human health, but also for a better understanding of nature, food production and energy, as well as many climate change solutions. Systems thinking, with great inspiration from systems biology, will also change many aspects of how we construct society. We can already see the start of this, with some countries focusing on well-being and quality of life as valid metrics on how well the country is doing,” he concludes.
