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As someone in the medical field who keeps up with the state of biological research, there's poo poo coming down the pipe that would blow your minds--if had the funding and political will to be made reality. One example that has just recently happened in the past few years is treatment of Hepatitis C. New antiviral drugs have turned it from a chronic disease with a high risk for liver cirrhosis and liver cancer into a 99% curable illness. It's a miracle for the field, and you've never heard about it. Only problem is that the cost of a 3-6 month round of drugs is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars thanks to drug companies. There's so much poo poo that could become reality relatively soon if we focused our nation's resources. Growable organs are getting better--we can already grow skin, bladder, and miniature hearts. Working on kidneys and liver. Organ transplantation is progressing--small bowel and pancreas transplantation are now possibilities. Unlocking finer control of the immune system could bring a whole host of advances. Already immunotherapy is becoming the 4th pillar in cancer treatment along with chemo, radiation, and surgery. Recently Jimmy Carter survived metastatic melanoma thanks to immunotherapy. Immune system control would allow for easy organ transplantation and new treatments for autoimmune disease. We've also undergone a quiet revolution in organ replacement therapy. Not just intermittent dialysis--now ICUs have continuous dialysis, liver replacement therapy like MARS, and updated heart supplementation with LVADs (left ventricular assist devices) and total heart lung substitution with ECMO (extra corporeal membrane oxygenation). Meanwhile advances in computing, robotics, and chemistry have allowed for drug screening on a massive scale, testing thousands of substances at a time assembly line style for biological effect. Further advances in computing would allow for simulation to replace the process, or further advances in biology would allow for "cell/tissue/organ on a chip" devices for rapid experimentation. Vaccines continue to be produced, limited only by the willingness to pay for the extensive FDA testing process. If our society devoted themselves to it, it's not outside the realm of possibility to eradicate a large portion of disease entirely, virtually eliminate cancer, and provide organ-replacement therapy for most organs until a suitable on-the-spot replacement can be grown and transplanted. The only question of technological progress is one of political will and funding--there's no shortage of imagination.
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Jan 27, 2016 05:56
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 10:30 |
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DrSunshine posted:We won't see another quantum leap in these, I'd imagine, until we perfect technologies that can again enhance the physical being of society by another order of magnitude, things like AI, molecular nanotechnology, and fusion power. Fusion power is totally doable. The first experimental reactors producing more power than it costs to run them have been made. ITER in France is supposed to be the first large reactor. I would suspect that as materials knowledge, superconductor knowledge, and practical experience with large-scale fusion reactors increases, the designs could be significantly improved. Then we can talk about the kind of society super-cheap energy could make. Nanotechnology is a great example of untapped potential. I don't even know enough to predict what will happen with it, but combining it with advances in molecular biology will be really loving cool. AI... I'm not as convinced we'll see any progress. However, we've gotten very good at making moderately-trainable systems like neural nets, voice recognition, pattern recognition, machine vision, etc that are poised to transform society as well. Self-driving cars, trucks, and planes are just the beginning. Properly trained, a neural-net based system can transform our thinking-work much the same way our manual work was changed. Massive pattern-recognition systems working with datasets could eliminate a large number of office jobs. Obviously, that could be a bad thing if not implemented properly to retrain workers in the short term and redistribute wealth in the long term, but that's another potentially transformative technology.
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Jan 27, 2016 07:00
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computer parts posted:Nope, because the thing about anti-biotic resistance is that it requires many more resources than the normal bacteria. Once the environmental pressures are relieved (i.e., people say "oh poo poo these antibiotics won't work anymore) then the anti-biotic resistant bacteria will be outbred. I was going to post this. What you need is a large enough stable of antibiotics that you can switch to other ones until resistances at your hospital, community, etc go down. Also some antibiotics continue to work forever on some bacteria because there is no easily evolved mechanism of resistance--group A strep are 100% susceptible to standard penicillin, with no exceptions. The problem, again, is money. Antibiotics are not profitable drugs to create--it's a very crowded market. If the government were willing to subsidize antibiotic creation, I'm sure more could be developed.
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Jan 27, 2016 20:42
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FilthyImp posted:make on-the-spot GPS assisted changes to your route gently caress yeah, this. My wife and I were just talking the other day about how amazing it is that over our lifetimes roadtrips have gone from pulling out an atlas to plan the route to printing out mapquest directions to printing out slightly better google maps directions to using google maps / apple maps on the phone to using waze / google maps equipped with waze reporting for real-time changes in your route based on local traffic conditions. Saves a little time on my daily commute and a ton of time on road trips. loving futuristic.
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Jan 29, 2016 06:25
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Work at the VA and you can see patients who are on their 3rd, 4th, 5th heart attack. Still smoking, of course.
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Jan 30, 2016 02:09
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The whole instant access to the sum of human knowledge thing is also significantly affecting the day-to-day of medicine. You're on rounds, and a particular question comes up for a patient. Pull out your phone, and you have all your guidelines to inform your clinical decision making. 20-30 years ago, that wouldn't have worked. Guidelines can be rapidly updated, rapidly implemented, and far more detailed than before now that we aren't relying just on human memory. I don't need to remember an entire complex dosing regimen or decision flowchart for a condition--just that it exists and where to look it up. It allows me to be more efficient.
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Jan 31, 2016 09:00
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Blue Star posted:I know Moore's Law wasn't literally a scientific law; it was just an observation. But the point is that the pace of progress has definitely slowed down. This might not be so bad for consumers, since our smartphones and tablets are about as good as we would need them to be for our emails, texting, Youtube watching, etc. But I remember reading that there are difficulties with reaching exascale supercomputing. This isn't a huge deal for consumers but it's going to be harder to advance in any field that requires better and more powerful computing power. Personalized medicine has already arrived. People routinely get different cancer treatments based on their genetics and their tumor's specific genetics. Breast cancer treatment has been significantly improved by the addition of SERMs (selective estrogen receptor something-or-anothers, modulators maybe?) for those who have estrogen receptor positive tumors, for example. There's a series of genetic tests to personalize warfarin dosing regimens, although they are too expensive to routinely use. Stem cells have shown promise in heart disease and neurodegenerative disease. While regenerating neurons has proven very difficult, regenerating their support cells, the glia, has been very successful. Stem cell bone marrow transplants are routine during treatment of liquid tumors. The problem with sequencing the genome is that we have since discovered it isn't the full story. Each cell's own genome is modified for its specific role by adding on chemical tags to selectively enhance or decrease certain gene expressions, creating an expression pattern for each cell type. This is done by methylation, acetylation, and various other chemical tags. We are only now starting to understand their role, although a few diseases have been identified as disorders of the "epigenome." Prader-Wili and Angelman's (happy puppet) syndromes were discovered to be due to different epigenetic disorders of the same gene, for example. In short, lots of this stuff is happening already, you just haven't heard about it. Cantorsdust fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Feb 1, 2016 |
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Feb 1, 2016 08:19
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 10:30 |
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Woolie Wool posted:Afghan wedding parties are being blown up by killer robots I'm actually going to touch on this a bit. Technology has definitely revolutionized warfare in the past 70 years. It has revolutionized it to the point that the average American has now never been to war and is unlikely, as far as we can tell, to never be called to war again unless they join the military. 70 years ago, in contrast, an entire generation was drafted. Technology has created such powerful force multipliers of advanced weaponry, armor, and especially air power that our military does not rely on mass conscription anymore and has transitioned to a professional soldier service. Beyond the changes in military structure, the development of nuclear weapons and their subsequent refinement into hydrogen warheads delivered by a nuclear triad of ICBMs, nuclear bombers, and nuclear submarines has shaped the entire political structure of the world. For better or worse, an uneasy peace has settled among the developed nations. War has changed into proxy conflicts waged in developing nations--which is still utterly horrible and shouldn't be forgotten--but barring some unpredictable change in global politics, it is difficult to imagine a mass-mobilization, total war conflict in the WW2 style occurring again. Prior to WW2 European nations erupted in war every couple of generations. War has ended in Europe because technology has made it too costly. That's an enormous change from the 1940s.
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Feb 2, 2016 03:41
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