Nanotechnology

Industrial manufacturing has, for the past two hundred years, mostly been concerned with macro-scale objects. The specifications for our cars, bridges, homes, and widgets are almost always in familiar dimensions that we can see or feel. Partially this is out of necessity: until recently, we simply lacked the ability for more precise specifications. Millimeters are the smallest units of length we deal with in our everyday lives, so making our products accurate to this level was typically good enough. This is quickly changing.

Nanotechnology is the science of manipulating objects on nanometer (one-billionth of a meter) scales. At this level, it is possible to position individual atoms and molecules where we want them. One of the best-known early demonstrations of this concept came in 1989, when IBM scientists essentially used molecule-sized tongs to carefully pick up and position 35 xenon atoms to spell IBM. Since then, our ability to work with tiny objects has improved every year, and shows no sign of slowing down. One of the most useful applications to date is in computing: Nearly all modern computer chips now use transistors that are only a few nanometers across.

Other applications of nanotechnology are starting to reach the market. Stain-proof and water-proof clothes have been available for a few years now. The cotton fibers in the clothes are attached to tiny nanomachines which actively repel foreign substances like water. Nanoparticles have found their way into commercial sunscreens as well, making them much more effective by forming a thin screen at the molecular level.

But today’s applications are just the tip of the iceberg of nanotechnology’s potential. As our ability to manipulate tiny structures improves, so will the range of possibilities available to us. Mature nanotechnology will grant us access to a veritable cornucopia of goods. Graphene – an arrangement of carbon atoms first created in 2004 – is 100 times stronger than steel, harder than diamond, but as flexible as plastic. It is one of the thinnest, lightest, strongest substances ever discovered, and may find its way into many common products in the coming decades, making computers faster, batteries better, food fresher, solar cells more efficient, and vehicles and bridges lighter. Two scientists took home the 2010 Nobel Physics Prize for their work with graphene.

Another recently-discovered nanoparticle, the gold nanosphere, may one day prove to be an effective cancer treatment. Its talent lies in its tiny size and its ability to conduct immense amounts of heat. By attaching a piece of protein to a gold nanosphere, it is capable of seeking out cancer cells and attaching itself. Once it has attached itself, a doctor can flash a burst of infrared light. This causes the gold nanosphere to heat up to extreme temperatures, killing the cell to which it is attached. If it withstands FDA trials, it could become a standard treatment for cancer, since it results in far less collateral damage than chemotherapy.

But new substances and chemicals are not the only benefit of nanotechnology. In the more distant future, there is no physical barrier preventing the development of microscopic robots at the nano-scale. These nanobots could radically transform our world – patrolling the environment to clean up pollution one molecule at a time, keeping intruding pathogens or harmful mutations out of our bodies, assembling anything we want from a hamburger to a piece of jewelry in front of our eyes, or (if proper precautions aren’t taken) consuming the entire world and reducing it to gray goo. In 1995, the late nanotechnology grandfather Richard Smalley wrote, “The list of things you could do with nanotechnology reads like much of the Christmas Wish List of our civilization.” As we master the ability to manipulate the world at the atomic level, we must also master the ability to prevent the technology from destroying us.

PREDICTIONS:
By 2026 – At least one treatment employing nanoparticles is routinely used in the United States to treat cancer.
By 2035 – Graphene is routinely used in structures (e.g. bridges and buildings) that need to be strong and light.
By 2050 – Nanobots can patrol the cells of our bodies, looking for any unwelcome intruders or mutations.
By 2055 – Molecular assemblers are able to produce nearly any macro-scale product we need, provided that they have the raw materials.

Blissful Genetic Ignorance - Will We Want to Know Our Genomes?

A couple readers have questioned me about the Genomic Revolution, wondering if people will truly want to know their genome even if they are able. As I mentioned in a previous post, people prefer to avoid thinking about things that seem both horrifying and inevitable. This is understandable. Would a person truly want to know that they are doomed to suffer from, say, Alzheimer’s disease or some other affliction that is commonly regarded as a fate worse than death?

While I can’t speak personally for anyone other than myself, I think that most people will ultimately prefer to know. As personal genomics becomes more commonplace, the mindset of blissful genetic ignorance will probably fade away. This wouldn’t be the first time that a new medical paradigm has changed public opinion about how much they should know. In a 1961 poll, 90% of US physicians surveyed said that they wouldn’t tell their patients if they had cancer. At the time, most doctors believed that patients would be better off not knowing since little could be done. But as cancer screening and treatment became more common in the subsequent decades, this mindset vanished almost entirely. Today it is hardly even imaginable that a doctor would not tell a patient if they had cancer.

There are so many advantages in knowing what conditions we are most at risk for. Ultimately, I think the knowledge of which of our unhealthy behaviors we most need to change (and which we can indulge in), and what prescriptions are most likely to be effective for our personal genome is simply more important than the unpleasant knowledge that we will eventually develop a certain condition. Practically everyone is at risk for something, and everyone accepts this. Would it really be so much worse for our psyches to know our specific risks instead of just a vague sense that we will develop something?

Please share your opinion. Would you want to know if you would eventually develop a disease?

The Future of Health Care - The End of Aging

What disease kills 100,000 people every day (usually after a prolonged period of pain and illness), affects nearly everyone, and kills about 90% of people in the industrialized world?

Aubrey de Grey, a renowned gerontologist, is on a quest to eliminate aging. The search for the fountain of youth has confounded humanity for millennia, but de Grey is on more solid scientific ground than most of his predecessors in this field. He has identified what he believes are the seven causes of biological aging – a list which has remained unchanged for the past 30 years – as well as the solutions for dealing with each cause. These solutions are not merely theoretical; they have all been demonstrated in labs, although most of them are many years away from being generally available.

Some casual observers may conclude that it is physically impossible to prevent aging since people have been trying and failing to do so for millennia. But the fact is that there are naturally-occurring examples of cells that do not age. Unfortunately, they’re called cancer cells, and tend to have the nasty side effect of killing people. Nevertheless, they do demonstrate the reality of cells that do not age.

Each cell in our body normally has an hourglass in it; the cell replicates as many times as it can, then commits suicide when the hourglass runs out of sand. But scientists have discovered how to add more sand to the hourglass. It’s an enzyme called telomerase that occurs at the end of DNA strands. Each time our cells divide, the DNA strands become frayed at the end, until eventually they are too unstable and self-destruct. For the discovery of telomerase in 1984 and subsequent analysis of how it relates to aging, three scientists were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

There is still a lot of research that needs to be done before it is possible to halt or reverse the aging process in humans. De Grey’s organizations, the SENS Foundation and the Methuselah Foundation, are currently testing life-extension therapies on mice. The Methuselah Foundation offers the MPrize: a reward of up to $4 million to anyone who can extend the lifespan of mice to record-breaking lengths. The goal is to eventually apply this knowledge to increase the human lifespan.

De Grey is not interested in extending the portion of life in which people are old, frail, and sick. His goal is to extend the healthy portion of life, and ultimately to prevent people from ever growing old at all…and reversing the aging process for those who are already elderly. This is not pie-in-the-sky immortality, as it won’t eliminate all causes of death. It would, however, offer the possibility of lifespans of indefinite length. De Grey has explained the concept as the “Longevity Escape Velocity.” Over the past century, medicine has done an excellent job preventing people from dying at young ages, but very little to prevent aging or increase the maximum human lifespan. At the present, medicine is progressing relatively slowly, adding a few weeks to our lifespan every year. When the Genomic Revolution picks up pace within the next few years, it is likely that this will be increased to a few months every year. De Grey hopes that eventually we can attack the root causes of aging itself to add more than one year to the human lifespan every year. He believes that the first person to reach age 1,000 is alive today…and is probably only about ten years younger than the first person to live to age 150.

The concepts of aging and old age are so ingrained in our mindset that we tend to not even think about them. Like anything that is both horrifying and seemingly inevitable, we have a remarkable ability to push aging out of our minds, or even to go through mental contortions to rationalize it as a good thing. Virtually all major life decisions we make – what career to pursue, how much of our money to save, how much risk to take, who to marry, how many children to have, when to retire, what our religious beliefs are, if or when we should go to college – are ultimately premised on the assumption that we will grow old and die, probably between ages 70 and 100. But what if this ceases to be the case? There is almost nothing that would alter our lifestyles, worldviews, beliefs, and culture as profoundly as the end of aging and the mindset that accompanies it.

Modern biology has already discovered theoretical solutions to all of the causes of aging; it is now a matter of applying them and developing solutions that work for human beings.

(The SENS Foundation and the Methuselah Foundation are non-profit organizations under US law. All donations are tax-deductible. If you have some money to donate, these organizations are helping to solve the single worst disease threatening humanity.)

PREDICTIONS:
By 2045 – The aging process has been halted, for all intents and purposes. People no longer grow old beyond their peak healthy age, between 18 and 25.
By 2060 – It is possible to reverse existing damage from the aging process. It is no longer possible to estimate an adult’s chronological age merely by looking at them. Diseases of old age have, for the most part, ceased to be a problem.

The Future of Health Care - The Genomic Revolution

For the first time in decades, we are due for a completely transformational change in health care. We are on the cusp of the Genomic Revolution, and we will start seeing the earliest results in the immediate future. Personal genomics – the practice of tailoring prescriptions, treatments, and lifestyle choices to an individual based on their genes – will soon depose the old paradigm of medicine. No longer will doctors merely give patients the drugs with the highest chance of success; they will be able to predict whether or not the drug will be effective for a specific person. No longer will patients try to base their diet and exercise habits on generic recommendations of what is healthy and what is not; instead, they can determine the healthiest lifestyle for their genetic makeup specifically. Health care will become mostly preventative, rather than reactive.

Why now? What is the driving force behind this paradigm shift? For the first time in human history, we have enough computing power to cheaply and quickly sequence the human genome. In the very near future, nearly everyone will have access to their entire DNA code, which they can carry on their smartphones. When Craig Venter became the first person to have his genome sequenced in 2000 as part of the Human Genome Project, it cost $3 billion and took thirteen years. When James Watson had his genome sequenced in 2007, it cost $2 million and took two months. Today, sequencing a human genome costs about $6,000 and takes a couple weeks. Within the next year, it is very likely that companies will offer genome sequencing for less than $1,000. Some observers view the $1,000 mark as a tipping point: the point at which average people can afford the service, and at which health insurers may start covering it. And after we have $1,000 genomes, $1 genomes won’t be far behind. Let’s not forget that the cost has dropped nearly a thousandfold in the last three years. Fast-forward a few more years, and it is conceivable that the cost of genome sequencing will be essentially nothing. I envision a day in the not-too-distant future when Walgreens and CVS will have self-service genome sequencing machines, as quick, cheap, and user-friendly as self-service photo machines.

Of course, merely knowing one's genetic code is worthless without knowing how to interpret it. While biologists have identified thousands of disease markers, there is vastly more that we don’t know about our genetic code. Some services available now, such as Google-funded 23AndMe, can test DNA to determine one’s predisposition to a narrow range of diseases, but this is only the tip of the iceberg of what is possible. As the cost of genome sequencing approaches zero, nearly everyone will have it done. As the total number of genomes grows from thousands to millions to billions, scientists will have a treasure trove of data to analyze diseases and patient responses to medication. A machine called a microarray allows scientists to compare different DNA sequences and search for correlations. As more and more human genomes are available to be analyzed, patterns will become more evident and it will become much easier to unearth the specific genes associated with certain diseases. Patients who know the diseases for which they are at risk will be able to modify their lifestyle to prevent them from arising.

Those who are unlucky enough to get a disease in spite of (or because of) their lifestyle will have access to much more robust treatments than those currently available. By pinpointing the genetic location of a particular disease, scientists will be able to understand what caused the disease and how it can be reversed. Think of our genetic code like a computer program: Understanding the cause and location of the bugs will enable us to fix them. In the slightly more distant future, it will be possible to directly repair defective genes, such as those that cause cancer, through genetic therapy.

The next ten years will be the most transformative decade in human history for medicine, as we finally unlock the secrets of our genetic code which have been a mystery since the dawn of humanity. The things I have described here are by no means a comprehensive description of the benefits of the Genomic Revolution, and the new paradigm will not be without problems of its own. To be continued in another blog post…

PREDICTIONS:
By 2011 – At least one company offers genome sequencing for $1,000 or less
By 2014 – At least one company offers genome sequencing for $100 or less
By 2019 – Over half of all Americans have had their genomes sequenced
By 2021 – U.S. sales of personalized medicine (i.e. drugs tailored to the patient’s specific genetic profile) are greater than sales of non-personalized, mass-market medicine

The Future of Agriculture - In Vitro Meat

With the speed at which biotechnology is progressing, it seems very likely that by the end of the decade, we'll be able to grow meat in laboratories at a price that is competitive with meat grown in ranches. It is already possible to produce it, but as of now it is horrendously expensive and has the texture of runny eggs. Not exactly appetizing. Scientists have learned that they can manually "stretch" the cells in a laboratory to mimic the muscle movements of a live animal. By the end of the decade, it is likely that scientists will have the ability to produce lab-grown versions of meats like hamburgers and hot dogs, for which texture is not as important. It will probably take several years longer before we get to taste any lab-grown steaks.

New Harvest is a non-profit dedicated to the research and development of in vitro meat. PETA has offered a $1 million reward for the first team that can develop lab-grown chicken with the taste and texture of real chicken (although their 2012 deadline makes it highly unlikely that anyone will claim the prize). How would the world change if we switched from farm-grown meat to lab-grown meat? The benefits of this are hard to overstate.

The environmental impact will be enormous. Every pound of beef requires 30 or more pounds of crops to feed the cow. Pork and chicken aren't quite as crop-intensive as beef, but nevertheless consume a very large amount of resources. This is a huge drain on our water supplies and farmland. If our meat was grown in a lab, it could completely eliminate these problems, freeing up our land and water supplies to be used for other productive things or returned to nature. Along with solar energy, this is the emerging environmental technology that I am most excited about.

The health impacts of lab-grown meat could be very large too. As it stands now, red meat is extremely unhealthy. It has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer. Growing our meat in the laboratory would enable us to tinker with the genes to make it more nutritious, and to control how much fat is in the meat. Imagine eating something that tastes like a cow, with the nutritional content of a fish. We would be able to eat some of our favorite foods as often as we wanted, without any guilt or negative health consequences.

Furthermore, those with moral or religious qualms about eating meat could sleep easily at night, knowing that no animal was killed just so that they could eat dinner.

I think that right now, the "yuck" factor might dissuade people from trying it. But this is really just a matter of how the lab-grown meat was marketed. If it had the same taste and texture of actual meat, I definitely could see this becoming very popular. And after it became commonplace, the "yuck" factor would disappear on its own. What do you think? Would you eat lab-grown meat, assuming it had the same taste and texture of regular meat, at a reasonable price? I certainly would. It could save the world.

(Donations to New Harvest are tax deductible under US law, and are spent on university research on in vitro meat. It's a great cause with enormous potential to transform the world.)

PREDICTIONS:

By 2022 - Lab-grown hamburger (with the taste and texture of real hamburger) is sold commercially, for the same price or less.

By 2029 - Lab-grown steak (with the taste and texture of real steak) is sold commercially, for the same price or less.