i'm catching up on a few weeks of not being able to pay much attention to blogging, so I'm going to be writing about some news items that are not totally up to date. This one, though, is about something that doesn't need to be from today's news to be riveting.
Silicon Valley futurist Steve Jurvetsen predicts the creation of the first synthetic life form within a year, according to a March entry in the HYPERtext blog entitled Silicon Valley looks beyond Silicon (and the Valley) for 2008.
The first synthetic life form will be created - another mind-blowing prediction from Steve Jurvetsen. Steve says that within a year we'll see the creation of a bacteria-sized synthetic organism designed for either a biofuel or medical application. Apparently, UC Berkeley professors are already working on a mutation of a bug that excretes an anti-malarial compound. Wow.
This has both rosy and gloomy implications. Rosy: imagine being able to design synthetic cells that can beef up or even largely replace one facet of a person's immune system. This has tremendous implications for the AIDS epidemic (pandemic in places) and for less common but egregious diseases like lupus.
On the gloomy side-
- When have we ever developed a new technology that didn't get turned into a weapon within a decade of its creation?
- How long will it take before this invention benefits the vast mass of humanity and not just the super-rich? It will be a number of years reaching the price-is-no-object crowd - how long thereafter until this and other bleeding-edge fruits of biomedical research reach the people who need them the most?
One thing is perfectly clear. The possibility of this prediction coming true exists only because of the revolutionary synergies between biology and computer science we call systems biology. It can only translate into better care at the hospital bedside and in the community through further synergies between computer science and clinical research. In other words, health IT is key.
I'm still on the run this week and next, speaking at the annual meeting of the Clinical Research Forum and getting ready to appear on a panel at the Healthcare Blogging Summit to be held in Las Vegas on Monday (please come if you can!!). I'll be posting about both events as time allows. The CRF meetings are held at the Capital Hilton in DC, a hotel that hasn't figured out that business is done over the Internet and connectivity needs to be ubiquitous, so posting from there will be retrospective. I'm hoping the Venetian will do better on Monday.
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