Denmark has some of the best cancer care in the world. It also has one of the highest cancer rates in Europe (OECD/EC Country Cancer Profile, 2025). To the health futurist Bogi Eliasen, that is not a contradiction to explain away. It is the point. “Is that a success?” he asks.
Eliasen comes from the Faroe Islands, a scatter of eighteen wind-blown islands in the North Atlantic with about 54,000 people, where he initiated FarGen, the project to sequence the genomes of the whole nation, meant, he said, to build not a biobank but “a completely new health system”. He has circled the same question ever since: not how to treat people better, but how to keep them well.
His point is that Europe has confused two things it treats as one. It has spent a century perfecting how to treat disease, and barely learned how to create health. A country can build the finest hospitals in the world and still have a sick population. “Is our ambition to have the best health system,” Eliasen asks, “or the healthiest population?”