Rivers of Tears - Convergent, Multi-Scale Approaches to Monitor and Optimize the Health of Our World's Inhabitants

The connectivity and interdependence of our world and its inhabitants' health have come under increasing focus. Elucidation of the common and interdependent mechanisms of health and disease requires approaches that facilitate understanding of complex systems behavior and probing of both individual and collective system parameters. To this end, multiscale physical and computational modeling offers a particularly powerful tool to predict behavior over vast time and length scales. Other novel technologies, e.g., rapid isolation nanotechnology developed to analyze nanoscale small extracellular vesicles in ocular tears, enable tracking of "fingerprints" from diseases as diverse as ocular to neurodegenerative (e.g., dementia) and cancer. In the future, it will be possible to track the health and disease of ecosystems and their inhabitants, using geospatial and epidemiological approaches, as well as novel biotechnologies, to prevent and mitigate disease processes and enhance well-being. These concepts are applied by way of an exemplary approach to understand and address the impact of toxic, recalcitrant manmade chemicals (i.e., PFAS) on the health of ecosystems and their diverse inhabitants. Such convergent efforts will be necessary and a priority for solving the complex problems threatening the health of our planet and its inhabitants.