Sven Johnson has just filed another report from the very near future. In this month’s Future Imperfect, he looks at the impact of a massive and deliberate leak of the medical data of ordinary Americans onto the internet.
Tag Archives: medicine
Needle-free vaccine
Good news for spike-averse individuals like myself with the ongoing development of a vaccination method that claims to be as pleasant as drinking a yogurt smoothie:
This new generation vaccine has big benefits beyond eliminating the “Ouch!” factor. Delivering the vaccine to the gut — rather than injecting it into a muscle — harnesses the full power of the body’s primary immune force, which is located in the small intestine.
…
“Nature isn’t used to seeing antigens injected into a muscle,” said Barrett, who also is a physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “The place where your immune system is designed to encounter and mount a defense against antigens is your gut.”
Wonderful news.
Genetically selected babies
A first for Spain. An earlier version of the story was calling it the first ever, but that can’t be true, can it?
The mother of a child whose life has been saved thanks to the stem cells from the birth of his brother, who was genetically modified to serve such a purpose, has said ‘Andrés is happy.’ The 7 year old boy has now overcome a severe hereditary congenital anaemia, thanks to the blood from Javier Mariscal, his newly born brother.
snip
The couple explained that they had decided not to have another child with the problem, but when the possibility of the Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis arose, they had no doubts, especially as they really wanted another child. Now Andrés will [presumably] have a normal life, instead of living just 35 years, the average for someone with what is now his previous condition.
Wishing the family well, and not wanting to be a Luddite, but readers can probably recite the ethical concerns for themselves.
[DNA Man: tom.arthur]
Fear-free living through pharmaceuticals
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself!” President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said (about the time he was enacting policies that may have lengthened the Great Depression, so he may have been wrong about that, but still, it’s a good quote).
But thanks to a team of Dutch researchers, led by Merel Kindt at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, we may not even have fear to fear in the future: using the beta-blocker propranolol they weakened the fear response and fear memories in human volunteers. Not only that, the fear did not return (Via EurekAlert):
Before fear memories are stored in the long-term memory, there is a temporary labile phase. During this phase, protein synthesis takes place that ‘records’ the memories. The traditional idea was that the memory is established after this phase and can, therefore, no longer be altered. However, this protein synthesis also occurs when memories are retrieved from the memory and so there is once again a labile phase at that moment. The researchers managed to successfully intervene in this phase.
During their experiments the researchers showed images of two different spiders to the human volunteers. One of the spider images was accompanied by a pain stimulus and the other was not. Eventually the human volunteers exhibited a startle response (fear) upon seeing the first spider without the pain stimulus being administered. The anxiety for this spider had therefore been acquired.
One day later the fear memory was reactivated, as a result of which the protein synthesis occurred again. Just before the reactivation, the human volunteers were administered the beta-blocker propranolol. On the third day it was found that the volunteers who had been administered propranolol no longer exhibited a fear response on seeing the spider, unlike the control group who had been administered a placebo. The group that had received propranolol but whose memory was not reactivated still exhibited a strong startle response.
The volunteers could still remember the association between the spider and pain stimulus, but it no longer elicited any emotional response. The researchers hope this work may lead to new treatments for patients with anxiety disorders.
Being the SFfish guy I am, I’m thinking more in terms of fearless super-soldiers, but I’m sure that’s just me.
(Interestingly, propranolol is already used by musicians and actors to deal with stage fright.)
(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)
[tags]drugs,medicine,psychiatry,psychology, pharmaceuticals, fear[/tags]
Fabbing your new fingerbones
While 3D printing may be used predominantly for rapid prototyping of consumer goods (with all the potential risks that entails), it may turn out to have more humanitarian deployments as well. Proving a concept we mentioned a while back, a team of Swiss doctors have used a 3D printer to build replacement bones for a man’s thumb:
Weinand loaded the printer with tricalcium phosphate and a type of polylactic acid – natural structural materials found in the human body. The resulting bone “scaffolds” contained thousands of tiny pores into which bone cells could settle, grow and eventually displace the biodegradable scaffold altogether.
The bones still have to be ‘grown’ around the scaffold (using a surrogate mutant mouse, much like the famous Vacanti ear experiment), so it’s not a completely non-biological process. But it’s a step closer to a world where we can buy spare parts for our meat-machines ‘off the shelf’. [image by ansik]