Systems biology facilitates rapid and inexpensive mathematical modeling of
therapies before incurring the expense of lab testing. Such modeling is already
beginning to suggests ways to improve upon specific cancer therapies. Factor
in:

• An available pool of drug
  research talent from all over the world, as one Net-based initiative does,
  and
• The falling cost and growing power of drug development technologies, added to
  a potentially growing number of jobless chemists,

and the rising tide of athletic-performance-enhancing drugs (along with many
honest therapeutic drugs) could turn into a tsunami.

Oh, and by the way, scientists have created new matter.

A German supermarket has shopping carts that guide customers to the items
they seek, scales that can tell apples from oranges, shelves that ask to be
restocked at the right time, and digital price tags that can be changed
instantly. The store is owned by Metro Group, the world’s fifth largest
retailer.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) product tags are the key enabling
technology. Proctor & Gamble, Gillette, and Kraft Foods are all testing RFID
tags on their products in the Metro store. Wal-Mart (as we have reported before)
has mandated that its suppliers use RFID tags by 2005, but Metro is more
aggressive, requiring 100 of its suppliers to do so by this November, reports
Joan Verdon in the San Jose Mercury News.

Since opening in April, the store has drawn over 7,000 international visitors
just to view the technology, and about 2,500 shoppers a day. IBM designed the
system to handle the data generated by the tags, as well as the “Veggie Vision”
scales whose built-in camera and recognition software can tell “broccoli from
bananas.”

To quell consumer privacy concerns, Metro stores will have a kiosk where
shoppers can deactivate the tags as they leave the store.

Some of the technology could be in New Jersey supermarkets within a year to
18 months.

Reference: Verdon, Joan (2004). “Smart store’s
innovations may jumpstart retail technology.” The Record/San Jose Mercury
News, January 14.

The End of Work

A Canadian bioethicist has taken her colleagues to task for ignoring mundane
but vital issues of equity and development in favor of sexy “post-human” or
“transhuman” issues such as genetic and other enhancement technologies.
“Bioethics risks becoming a source of entertainment and spectacle in wealthy
societies whose inhabitants overlook the poverty and suffering found throughout
most of the world,” she wrote in the British Medical Journal.

BetterHumans contributor James Hughes does not entirely agree, arguing
that “we can care about the injustices of the present and the promise of the
future at the same time. A focus on injustice without a promise of a better
future is a formula for burnout and despair, while all promise and no attention
to injustice is blind to how we will all get there.”

Take the spread of robotics, for example, which “poses an enormous challenge”
for developing countries by threatening to turn off the life-giving spigot of
jobs (even if low-paid and devoid of benefits) moving from the developed
countries thanks to globalization. Hughes cites one credible estimate that
roboticization will eliminate half of all current jobs in Europe and North
America by 2050 (the current US “jobless recovery” is a sign that this
prediction is on track), and argues that the same process has now begun in the
developing world, with “fewer manufacturing jobs in China today than there were
10 years ago.”

In the North, a growing reduction in the ratio of tax-paying workers to
tax-dependent retirees resulting from the baby boom, shrinking birth rates, the
loss of jobs to the second and third worlds, and greater longevity, is
exacerbated by roboticization. Hughes’s suggestion that the North should
therefore import more immigrant labor from the South seems out of whack with his
thesis that jobs are going neither South nor North, but disappearing off the
face of the Earth; however, he gets back on track by wondering how the global
economy can survive without paid human workers able to consume.

The answer, he suggests, is that “The robotic economies will have to adapt by
renegotiating the relationship of work, taxation and income, nationally and
worldwide.” He is talking about imposing higher taxes on automated businesses to
finance a social wage guaranteed to every citizen, with or without a job.
Support for this (not so new) idea is growing in Europe and Africa, and even
some economists of the International Monetary Fund are recommending that Nigeria
try it out, but it is recognized that it really cannot happen under the current
unfettered, ungoverned free-market paradigm, since capital would simply flow
away from the higher-taxed (therefore less profitable) companies in a social
wage economy. It can only happen if the IMF, World Bank, ILO, UN, and other
managers of the global economy and society establish a level playing field
through more governance and control over global trade, economics, and labor
practices.

“The challenge,” says Hughes, “will be great, but we need to begin now to
look at an economic model for a future in which jobs for humans become scarcer,
in which the jobs that remain require increasing education and in which there is
growing prosperity due to the powerful new technologies of genetic engineering,
nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and robotics.” He may have understated
the challenge, but certainly not the need.

Reference: Hughes, James (2004). “Why
Africa Should Care about Robots.” BetterHumans, January 26.

BioMathematics

Acceleration in the understanding of the systems biology, at the molecular
and proteomic level, of cancer is allowing useful mathematical models of the
disease to be developed. One such model shows that under certain circumstances a
tumor’s growth oscillates rather than progressing steadily, a finding that could
lead to a way to control tumor growth.

Immunotherapy, a major new weapon in the war on cancer, is “particularly
fertile ground for mathematical modeling,” reports the Economist
magazine. One model suggests how RNAi (RNA interference) therapy could prevent
large tumors from evading the immune system. The therapy is being tested in the
lab, and is showing enough promise that animal experiments may be next.

A mathematical model of Gleevec’s effects on chronic myeloid leukemia focuses
on the specific pathway by which Gleevec successfully blocks the action of a
damaging molecule in early-statge patients but not in final-stage “blast crisis”
patients. The model suggests that a chemical could correct this shortcoming.

Mathematical models of complex biological processes are still, at best, crude
representations of those processes, but they point in the direction of truth,
and their refinement and value in the war on cancer and other diseases can only
continue to accelerate as new computing power* comes on line to handle
complexity orders of magnitude greater than can be handled today.

* See e.g. “Next Gen Supercomputing” in the
Computing section.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “Malignant
maths.” The Economist, January 22.

Networked Drug Research

Innocentive is “the world’s largest virtual laboratory,” a global community
of more than 45,000 pharmaceutical and chemical researchers who receive up to
US$100,000 if they can solve a research problem stumping a company’s own
researchers. Originally created by and for US pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly,
Innocentive is now used by many other firms as well. Problems and their
solutions are posted anonymously. The BBC’s Mark Ward, citing an Innocentive
executive, reports how, in a recent case, “a tough problem in toxicology and
cell pathology was answered by a protein crystallographer who had just the right
combination of skills and knowledge to provide a solution.” The executive added
that the network was “helping scientists in Russia, India and China put their
expertise to good use and get access to complex problems that they might
otherwise never deal with.”

Reference: Ward, Mark (2004). “Virtual lab
aids drugs research.” BBC News, January 21.

Toward the Home Pharmacy

While pharmaceutical manufacturers worry about the cost of new technologies
required for drug discovery, their shadowy counterparts designing illicit
performance-enhancing drugs for athletes see technology costs differently. For
as little as US$50,000 in equipment and in as few as two or three weeks, organic
chemists can fairly easily design novel anabolic steroids that standard drug
tests cannot detect, because the tests rely on knowing a target compound’s
structure beforehand.

An expert in the topic also told Scientific American‘s Steven Ashley
that there are probably “thousands” of available steroid chemists with not much
else to do now that the birth-control pills whose R&D once consumed their
time have become a commodity product.

Reference: Ashley, Steven (2004), “Doping
by Design: Why new steroids are easy to make and hard to detect.” Scientific
American, January 12.

Matter Created in Lab

It seems our mastery of the fundamentals of creation is accelerating. In a
previous issue we reported on the creation of new forms of life. Now, Maggie
McKee tells us in the New Scientist, by applying a magnetic field to
supercooled potassium atoms, scientists have created a new form of matter. The
“fermionic condensate” substance could lead to superconductors that work at room
temperatures, which would “revolutionize the supply of electric power.” The
technique could also lead to the creation of other new forms of matter.

Reference: McKee, Maggie (2004). “New form of
matter created in lab.” New Scientist, January 29.