Tag Archives: medicine

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Snake robots to aid injured soldiers

snakebot_x2202A snake-like robot is being developed to aid medics in the rapid diagnosis and treatment of injured soldiers, from Technology Review:

Choset and his students have engineered a highly articulated robotic arm that consists of multiple actuated joints, which give the robot a snakelike flexibility. Each joint has two degrees of freedom that, working together, allow the robot to flex, retract, and twist into different configurations, much like a live snake.

As ever snakebots+military immediately put me in mind of Alastair Reynold’s excellent Century Rain.

[via Slashdot][image from Technology Review]

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Brain surgery, media, and serendipity

brainA North Carolina neurosurgeon had just about given up on the case of Brandon, a 19-year-old tumor patient, till a story on CNN.com led him to a new surgical tool that let him operate successfully.

Dr. Thomas Ellis, a senior neurosurgeon at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, had given the mother the bad news. But:

“As I do every night, I read CNN online and immediately saw on the front page that there was an article in the health section entitled, From military device to life-saving surgical tool. …”

Ellis got in touch with the manufacturer in Massachusetts, and 72 hours later the device was in his hands.

It was originally devised for the U.S. military, and rolled out for surgeries three months before Ellis read about it.

The tool allows surgeons to easily manipulate a CO2 laser and bend it to reach almost any tissue in the body, particularly in cases where scalpels may pose a danger.

Next day (Christmas Eve, no less):

“After only 30 minutes, it was clear this laser device, as simple to use as a scalpel, was successfully debulking the tumor.”

Ellis operated on Brandon for four hours and managed to remove the remaining 80 percent of the tumor by vaporizing it from the inside with the laser and then excising it.

“The boy was then extubated [removing the tube to his airway] after about 30 minutes and that same evening he was eating normally,” Wolf said.

Brandon has recovered his basic functions and is behaving normally.

Ellis says:

“I think it’s an amazing story because it’s yet another demonstration of how interconnected we’ve become in this world.

“You have a CNN reporter in London, who writes a story about a neurosurgeon in Chicago, who’s using a device that was invented in Massachusetts. That story is read by a different neurosurgeon in North Carolina, and all within 72 hours, we have the device in North Carolina.”

[PET scan image from Wikimedia Commons]

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Are you ready for personalized genomics?

genome Personalized genomics–a rundown on your inherited risk for certain conditions–is becoming a reality.

A couple of hundred dollars, a few drops of saliva and a stamped envelope is all it takes to get a rundown on your inherited risk of around a hundred more-or-less common conditions, everything from bladder cancer and baldness to male infertility and memory loss. You can place your order by Internet with companies like 23andMe (“genetics just got personal”) and deCODEme (“deCODE your health”).

The cost of sequencing an entire individual genome is about $100,000 right now, and Pacific Biosciences in Menlo Park, California (“a revolution in DNA sequencing is coming”), says it will be able, by 2013, to map all three billion base-pairs of a person’s DNA in a quarter of an hour for a few hundred dollars.

Critics are not enthralled. Many diseases are the result of a complex interplay of many different genes that we’re just beginning to understand. And there is fear that people with dicey genomes could be discriminated against by employers, insurers and banks. (President George W. Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act in the U.S. last year for that very reason.)

But here’s the real question: do you really want to know everything your genome could tell you? Is there any benefit in knowing you’re, say, 20 percent more likely to develop a fatal or debilitating disease? Might the worry about that possibility be almost as damaging to your quality of life as the disease itself?

What do you think?

As fast as the technology as advancing, you don’t have long to make up your mind.

(Via PhysOrg.)

(Image: U.S. Dept. of Energy Office of Science.)

[tags]genetics,DNA,ethics,medicine[/tags]

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Better living through fake chemistry – counterfeit pharmaceuticals flook UK

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pink pharmaceutical pillsWe’re all fairly accustomed to the idea of counterfeit goods made in the far East being passed off as the real thing in Western countries, but we tend to think of them as being things like designer clothing brands or consumer electronics.

The trouble with those items is that they’re bulky, still moderately expensive to produce, and easily spotted as fakes by someone with a sharp eye… which may explain why the new fakes of choice for criminal cartels shipping to the UK are pharmaceuticals. [image by amayzun]

The drugs in question have been so well cloned that they’ve even found their way into chemists and doctor’s surgeries, and their high price-tags in the UK market ensure there’s a good profit to be made – which suggests the problem will spread to other countries, too. Will the counterfeit drugs market ever eclipse the illegal drugs market?