Via Bruce Sterling, and does pretty much what it says on the tin. Video possibly unsuitable for those who don’t like being reminded of all the squishy functional bits inside of people (though no actual surgery is shown). Also unsuitable for those who don’t like soothing piano music.
Tag Archives: medicine
Doom du jour: the drugs don’t work
The increase in human longevity is due, in at least a significant part, to the invention of the antibiotic. But the age of the antibiotic may nearly be over, as we become victims of their success:
Last September, Walsh published details of a gene he had discovered, called NDM 1, which passes easily between types of bacteria called enterobacteriaceae such as E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae and makes them resistant to almost all of the powerful, last-line group of antibiotics called carbapenems. Yesterday’s paper revealed that NDM 1 is widespread in India and has arrived here as a result of global travel and medical tourism for, among other things, transplants, pregnancy care and cosmetic surgery.
“In many ways, this is it,” Walsh tells me. “This is potentially the end. There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against NDM 1-producing enterobacteriaceae. We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years, where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothing to treat these infections with.”
And this is the optimistic view – based on the assumption that drug companies can and will get moving on discovering new antibiotics to throw at the bacterial enemy.
It’s not just infectious diseases that will become a big problem again, either; without effective antibiotics, you can effectively rule out organ transplantation, and a whole raft of other stuff. Will that ten-year window be wide enough for us to develop some sort of blood-cleaning nanotech?
Speaking of drugs, those wacky chappies at the Pentagon are looking for new ways to stockpile vaccines against the possibility of global pandemics, and one plan that caught their eye was from a Canadian firm with the idea of gene-modding tobacco plants to produce a flu vaccine. I always thought “Canadian tobacco” was euphemistic street slang… y’know, “hey dude, where can I score some Canadian tobacco?*”
[ * Apologies to my Canuck readership for this woeful stereotype. If it makes any difference, I only rib you lot because you’re less easily offended than your brethren to the south. 😉 ]
Bacterial biker jackets and after-market parts for people
This year seems like it’ll be the one where the mainstream starts talking about custom-made replacement organs as something more than science fiction. A few weeks back we heard about the rat who got a new set of lab-grown lungs; this week, Wired is running a photo-essay on bioprinting that’s a must-see for anyone who wants to be able to write a plausible description of the working environment of a contemporary Frankenstein.
Meanwhile [via BoingBoing] Ecouterre reports on UK-based designer Suzanne Lee, who’s been using bacteria to grow an entire range of clothing from a rather mundane starting point – sweetened green tea. The end results are made entirely of cellulose, though they look (to me at least) like the skin of something that still slinks through radiation-soaked cities long after the posthumans abandoned Earth for the new terrain at the top of the gravity well…
Organic ain’t yer only option, though, no sir. 3D printing means one-off custom designs of mechanical prosthetic limb can be made for amputees or other folk with different levels of physical ability… and not just for us longpigs, either, as Oscar the cyborg cat ably demonstrates. 3D printing is still an unevenly distributed piece of the future, of course, but it’s spreading fast; Ponoko have just set up their first 3D print hub here in the UK, and if they can afford to do that in the current economic climate, the business model must have something going for it, right?
It’s interesting to see the organic and inorganic racing along in parallel like this; it doesn’t take a genius to see the possibilities of the two streams converging somewhere down the line, though I’d guess that’s a good few decades off from the present day. What’s interesting to me about these phenomena is the way they seem to be an end-game expression of the desire for individuality and customisation; at the moment, price will keep all but those with a serious need for these products out of the market, but as prices fall, everything will become bespoke, unique, a one-off. Which is kind of ironic if you think about it: through the total ubiquity of mechanised manufacture, we’re actually putting an end to mass production.
The apotheosis of J D Shapely
Hopeful news from the world of HIV/AIDS research:
… U.S. government scientists have discovered three powerful antibodies, the strongest of which neutralizes 91% of HIV strains, more than any AIDS antibody yet discovered.
[…]
The antibodies were discovered in the cells of a 60-year-old African-American gay man, known in the scientific literature as Donor 45, whose body made the antibodies naturally.
As William Gibson put it on Twitter: “They found J.D. Shapely! Off to Colored People for a celebratory backpiece! :-D”
(If you’re not grokking the reference, you should make time to read Gibson’s Virtual Light.)
And here’s a bonus line from the little article there, that puts the incredible amount of work involved in this sort of research into perspective:
Researchers screened 25 million of his cells to find 12 that produced the antibodies.
That is one mad tiny needle in a huge meat haystack, right there.
Preventing potential lesbianism in the womb
Science has brought us many wonderful things, but it sometimes gets picked up as a blunt instrument by people with deeply screwed up ideas about what is right and wrong. Worried your unborn female child might grow up to be uninterested in having children, or attracted to “traditionally masculine” career choices? Or – heaven forfend! – homosexual? Fear not: pediatric endocrinologist Maria New of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine reckons that her experimental hormone treatment for pregnant women can ensure the birth of little girls who think and act just like Jeebus and the Founding Fathers would have wanted. [That link via Cheryl Morgan; MeFi links to PZ Myers’ take on the same story.]
I don’t know which makes me more angry: that a medical practitioner – herself a woman! – could come up with such a plan and still sleep at night, or that there will be thousands of people who will be happy to have the body chemistry of their unborn child tampered with so long as it can prevent them turning out to be one of The Gays. So much for the Western societal myth of parental love being unconditional, not to mention the one about doctors being ethical.
In case you’re thinking “well, it’s a matter of parental choice, surely?”- try reversing the polarity of the story and thinking about how the guardians of public morals would respond. If a doctor announced a hormonal treatment that could ensure the expression of characteristics opposite to those traditionally associated with the sex of the child in question – a way of *gasp* manufacturing queers! – there’d be a white trash jihad on their home and clinic within hours of the news breaking. Hi-ho, heteronormativity.