A discursive monthly digest of news and commentary on long-range, leading edge technological innovations and their consequences and implications for healthcare policy and practice.
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Stephen J. Cavanagh Named new dean of the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Nursing
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Automation and the End of Work At years end 2011, MIT’s Technology Review pointed to “5 Disruptive Technologies Happening Now.” They were: E-books, 3D printers, digital CCTV, DNA sequencing machines, and artificial intelligence (AI). The first two are apotheoses of automation: They take humans largely out of the loop. The fifth—AI—will take us out completely, [...]
It’s been a week of disparate but interesting advances. Here’s a summary of those I chose to tweet: Therapeutics There have been very good results in mice of a 2-drug therapy for radiation sickness. And in human ALS patients undergoing a phase II clinical trial of new drug dexpramipexole, the progression of the disease was [...]
Digital Medicine With a processing speed of one trillion arithmetical floating point operations per second (1 teraflops) Intel’s latest computer chip is equivalent to a building-sized, 10,000-Pentium-chip supercomputer built a mere 14 years ago. Given such exponentially accelerating power, it should come as no surprise that the Beholder (as in ”Beauty is in the eye [...]
Personalized Medicine and Cancer The discovery of multiple genes for colorectal cancer will lead to diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic targets for the disease. In about two years, we may expect to have available a test for post-surgical colon cancer recurrence that will identify which patients might benefit from chemotherapy. We can expect a tsunami of [...]
Genomic and Molecular Medicine After many attempts over the past two decades, genetically modified mosquitoes may finally have a chance of helping to eradicate the dengue fever with which mosquitoes annually infect 100 million people and cause 500,000 cases of dengue hemorrhagic fever and 22,000 deaths, mostly among children. For the disease of choroideraemia (rarer [...]
A European court has ruled that methods using embryonic stem cells for research cannot be patented. If researchers can’t profit from the methods they develop (and without a patent, it is hard to do so) then they will either develop them pro bono publico and let others patent and profit from the methods in regions [...]
A computer model of early embryonic development in vertebrates is an important step in systems biology and computational biology, two nearly identical fields that will play a growing role in a new branch of medicine we call “digital medicine” by simulating human anatomy, physiology, metabolism and more on a computer. Surgeons already practice such medicine [...]
A well-designed and -implemented study has shown that our descendants will live longer if we take the right steps to live longer ourselves. Healthier behavior can change gene expression in an individual, and the life-prolonging results of that change are passed on the individual’s descendants—even though, perplexingly, the epigenetic change itself is not passed on. [...]
Am I the only one who thinks the horrible trend in child abuse is important enough to warrant urgent and spirited public debate? I was starting to think so until I saw an excellent multimedia treatment of “America’s child death shame” by the BBC. It inspired me to dust off an article I wrote but [...]
Here’s our weekly summary of tweets from @hfdigest, and their significance. Genomic and Regenerative Medicine Until now, the known genetic markers for melanoma have all been associated with skin pigmentation or moles. Now, three have been found that are not associated in that way, which means that people with those markers may be at even [...]
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