Interesting Future

Knowledge; deep, vast and specialized, is the first step of success in any profession. There are lots of interesting stuffs out there. Many exciting areas to do research on. But lets face it; most of us are mere humans. One can be a jack of many trades, but to be a leader, one has to be a master in that field. I am in search for such an area for my own scientific career. Looks like it is an interesting subject for a future blog. But let me focus on some thing that caught my imagination in last two days.

      Valentine’s weekend has turned out into a non-stop movie weekend. We watched a number of movies of which most interesting one to me was ‘Elysium’ (although most captivating one was ‘Captain Phillips’). Elysium has several interesting (dark) futuristic elements in it. With earth being over populated and polluted the wealthy citizen are relocated to an outer space habitat called Elysium. It has all the amenities and latest medical technologies that provide instant cure to all the health issues and provide immortality to the denizens of Elysium. Now the illegal immigration racket is not to smuggle people to USA, but it operates from USA to traffic people to Elysium. Of course rest is drama. I was wondering whether there would be such a machine that can cure all the health issues, even though the patient is fatally ill.

       What is the disease condition that does not have a genetic basis? Not many. If there is a genetic underpinning, it is conceivable to cure a disease by sophisticated genetic engineering combined with stem cell therapy (a potential topic for future discussion). How can you get a machine to do this job? I have no idea right now. It is a technical challenge as much as it is a biomedical one. I am certain that future medicine is going to be highly technology driven. The job of a doctor, for all practical purpose, is to examine a patient, study his vital signs, interpret the test result and process these information in his/her brain and match it with the data base doctor has (accumulated from experience/discussion/reading/internet) and come up with a diagnosis. Once diagnosis is made, deciding a treatment plan is not a difficult task. Conceptually, a computer and a really smart algorithm, with a huge amount of database to draw information from, can accomplish all these tasks. So, yes, such machine is quite possible. Surgeons and dentist may still be needed for a while, I suppose. Well, once you have designer babies, you will not need them as well.

        Future is going to be really interesting. It is my opinion that we human are beginning to take just baby steps. Our knowledge is far from complete. We are only in the early phase of making observations and gathering data. We are yet to conceive, forget about building, a machine that is  powerful enough to process all the data we collect to connect those dots logically. The immediate future is of big data, simulation, robotics and genome engineering. After then it will be of time, speed and space exploration. Who know what future has in store for us, if there is one!

Image courtesy and an interesting discussion on 'ring world': http://www.space.com/22326-elysium-movie-space-colonies-future.html