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Something even more terrifying to me is illuminated by a talk from John Sotos who served as Chief Medical Officer for Intel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK
by LMYahooTFY 8y ago
Something even more terrifying to me is illuminated by a talk from John Sotos who served as Chief Medical Officer for Intel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY
"...defensive technology always lags offensive technology. So you know, the cancer moonshot I would propose is dual use, just like nuclear weapons and nuclear power, two sides of the same coin. The ideal cancer treatment someday is going to be the doctors biopsy your tumor, get a sample, send it down to the lab, the lab will figure out the genetic signature of your exact cancer tumor. Then somebody will build a virus, that using that if-then statement, only targets the cancer cells in you. They'll put that virus inside you, you'll feel like you have a cold for a few days, the virus will go to work destroying your cancer, and then you'll wake up cancer free. That's a pretty good deal, we all want that to happen.
But notice this exquisite targeting overcomes that big drawback against bioweapons. So the new technologies are going to allow incredibly targeted bioweapons. So think about three different axis. Who might you target?...you could also target a family, like the royal family. You could target a group of people, or an entire species."
He goes on to describe examples of what he asserts will be possible to do, which is target virtually any identifiable characteristic among a life form, or cause practically any sort of deficiency or alteration within cells.
He also points out that Biotech is currently outpacing Moore's Law, and this technology will likely become extremely cheap extremely fast.
- Swizec 8y agoI have a friend who's doing a PHd in building logic gates in bacterial DNA so you could program, say, E. Coli to do specific things in the body. Learning about her research is astounding, fascinating, and terrifying all at the same time.
- samstave 8y agoNearly ten years ago I ran into a researcher from UCSF who was working with StemCells where she had designed a fluid-matrix that she 3D printed, then wrote a python program to control valves which released certain proteins to the cells to determine how to get them to express into a certain type tissue/organ cell. I just point out how cheap off the shelf tooling that we take for granted in our industries and hobbies are also fueling this wave of change and how readily available they are The tools and materials to build something like this are free and open to literally anyone on the planet. So it makes sense that given enough exposure to human ingenuity, with the right tools freely available, any reality is possible.
- joycian 8y agoCould you supply a research article by this person from UCSF? This sounds very interesting!
- johnchristopher 8y agoI'll be that guy and ask: ten years later, are there new treatments based on that field that we didn't have at that time ?
- simonh 8y agoProbably not. Most radically novel technological approaches to problems fail, but as the range of new tools and techniques available expand, their possible combinations increase exponentially. Most will still fail, but hopefully many of them won’t just as with startups.
- HeadsUpHigh 8y agoOn that specific field? No because there are many steps along the way that we haven't solved yet, but it's getting there, especially for heart tissue regeneration.
- Shorel 8y agoThis was the setting for plot of the 2006 novel "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge.
- qubax 8y ago> ...defensive technology always lags offensive technolog Because the best defense is a good offense.