And down the road, people might start swapping out organs just as part of a maintenance program. If young blood can make you more youthful, what might a whole new heart do? For that matter, can we produce our own “young” blood?

Can we print out new eyes with perfect vision, new ears with perfect hearing?

Nice straight new teeth?

And why stop at old body, new parts? How long before we can print out (not clone, mind you) a whole new body and just pop our brains into it?

1. Robots:
   • Drudge Report: …self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles http://drudge.tw/9PJ6rD

   • Barry Ptolemy: Computers Are Driving Cars In Traffic http://fb.me/ItKWo1Wa

   • Pete Cashmore: 10 Amazing Real Life Robots – http://mash.to/2RodQ

2. Space:
   • Drudge Report: Private spaceship makes 1st solo glide flight… http://drudge.tw/cM9dD0

   • Scientific American: Mission To Mars Will Search For Lost Atmosphere

3. Medicine:
   • Lifeboat Foundation: Atomic Medicine: Bret Kulakovich, author of “Atomic Medicine: Further Evidence of Accelerating Returns.” link

   • DISCOVER Magazine: Now that we can make designer babies, do we have an *obligation* to do so?

   • Sarah Multiverse: Berkeley Bionics had parapalegics using their new exoskeleton. Bawling like a baby.

   • Aaron Saenz: Italian Boy Receives Permanent ‘Artificial Heart’ Implant http://singularityhub.com/tag/artificial-heart/

4. Rapid Prototyping:
   • Sean Flanagan: Full-Scale Turbo-Prop Aircraft Engine built using 3D printing.

5. Computer Interface:
   • Sean Flanagan: Thoughtware.TV – Head-mounted display projects directly onto the retina. link

6. Out of the Box Engineering:
   • DiscoverMag DISCOVER Magazine: OK, this green “incredible edible house” is farfetched, but pics are great. And it has “hydroponic insulating shingles”

   • MIT proposes the Boeing D Series to Reinvent the 737 for 70% greater fuel efficiency

7. Fun Stuff:
   • io9: Death-defying wingsuit video shows what it’s like to be real-life superhero http://io9.com/5657398/

   • Boing Boing: A Free Comic, Courtesy Dan Goldman and Tor Books

8. Memes worth spreading:
   • Jay Oatway: Stephen Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” is a hymn to multidisciplinary creativity + open systems. link
9. Perspective:
   • Nathan Wolfe’s Jungle Search for Viruses.

10. Prize Winner:
    • Scientific American: Nobel Prize in Chemistry Honors Technique For Synthesizing Complex Compounds

Image via Wikipedia

It sounds pretty exciting when you first start reading it, but when you get to the bottom you realize that there might less to this than meets the eye.

It all sounds plausible enough — use RNA interference to knock out liver cancer by depriving tumors of the ability to to make proteins. No more proteins, no more cells. No more cells, no more tumor…get it? This is a new kind of warfare. Instead of sending in troops to engage the enemy one by one, we’re sending in Special Ops to cut off their supply lines. Starve the bastards.

The technique’s ability to attack single genes could lead to drugs for the 75 percent of cancer genes that lack any specific treatment, as well as for other illnesses. Alnylam is already testing RNAi therapy for Huntington’s disease and high cholesterol in cell cultures; other researchers are tackling macular degeneration, muscular dystrophy and HIV. The potential has driven nearly every major pharmaceutical company to start an RNAi program.

Wow, the cure for everything! Can I get two bottles? But wait:

“I think RNAi could work for anything,” [John] Rossi [a molecular geneticist at City of Hope National Medical Center in California] says. “But even if it only works for liver cancer, it would be pretty good.”

See, this is how they get you. Just a cure for liver cancer. Ha. Who needs that?

Image via Wikipedia

It sounds pretty exciting when you first start reading it, but when you get to the bottom you realize that there might less to this than meets the eye.

It all sounds plausible enough — use RNA interference to knock out liver cancer by depriving tumors of the ability to to make proteins. No more proteins, no more cells. No more cells, no more tumor…get it? This is a new kind of warfare. Instead of sending in troops to engage the enemy one by one, we’re sending in Special Ops to cut off their supply lines. Starve the bastards.

The technique’s ability to attack single genes could lead to drugs for the 75 percent of cancer genes that lack any specific treatment, as well as for other illnesses. Alnylam is already testing RNAi therapy for Huntington’s disease and high cholesterol in cell cultures; other researchers are tackling macular degeneration, muscular dystrophy and HIV. The potential has driven nearly every major pharmaceutical company to start an RNAi program.

Wow, the cure for everything! Can I get two bottles? But wait:

“I think RNAi could work for anything,” [John] Rossi [a molecular geneticist at City of Hope National Medical Center in California] says. “But even if it only works for liver cancer, it would be pretty good.”

See, this is how they get you. Just a cure for liver cancer. Ha. Who needs that?

May
the best health idea win.

BodyShock
is a call for ideas to improve global health over the next 3-10 years
by transforming our bodies and lifestyles. NextNow members are invited
to enter today! Read the full press release (with video) here – http://www.iftf.org/node/3514

Are you:

• a DIY scientist trying to extend healthy human life?
• a developer who wants to invent a mobile diabetes app?
• an elder caregiver with ideas to help people age in place?
• a patient creating an emotional wellness tracker?
• a citizen with a plan to reduce air pollution in your community?

1. Send us your visual idea by September 1, 2010. The earlier
   you enter, the more time you have to gather votes for your idea. Enter here.
2. Vote for your favorite idea. Do you think musical stairs
   will work, or are implantable sensors a better idea? Make your voice
   heard – cast your vote.
3. We’ll help bring your ideas to life. Up to 5 winners will
   be celebrated at Institute For The Future in Palo Alto, California on October 8, to present their
   ideas and be connected to mentors and resources. One of these ideas
   will also win the $3,000 Roy Amara Prize.

Good luck, and may those who help the most win.

Would like to hear about any ideas that Speculist readers submit. Stephen and I will spend some time discussing our own ideas on tomorrow night’s FastForward radio.

Dispensing medicine is about to get more efficient. New Jersey’s Holy Name Hospital is using robot pharmacists to package, store and dispense medications, while an automated system at an Ohio children’s hospital is preparing I.V. drugs for patients. Automation in medicine is reducing human error and cutting costs, and because these robots can handle pills in a fraction of the time it takes humans, we should be noticing a lot more of them around real soon.

Read the whole thing. Automation is the key to addressing the fundamental scarcity of health care that underlies the current (and probably most past and future) debates about whether providing health care should be a primarily public or private concern.

I finally got out of the hospital FIVE HOURS after the doctor said I was good to go. It didn’t matter that much, I suppose. I went from lying in a hospital bed with fluids being pumped into me to lying on the couch at home sipping Gatorade.

It could be argued that all sides of the health care debate agree that there is a scarcity of medical care. In fact, the whole health care debate may just hinge on the question of whether the government or the market represents the most efficient and humane principal source of distribution of care — although the more ideological proponents on either side would likely insist that their positions are simply right, and that efficiency and / or humanitarian concerns — while addressed better by their approach, anyway — are simply not the issue. But assuming that at least a some part of the debate has to do with how best to handle scarcity, I’m left with wondering what that five-hour wait implies.

A couple of days in the hospital is a handy reminder that — although we have made huge steps forward in basic medical care in recent years — we still have a long way to go. One of my three wishes is for everyone on earth to be healthy. For that to truly happen, human illness needs to become a solved game. We have a long way to go before that’s the case.

Professor Mike Stratton:

This is a fundamental moment in cancer research. From here on in we will think about cancers in a very different way. We will think about them in terms of the number of abnormalities…

These win-lose scenarios are based on conventional assumptions which, to their credit, have been correct throughout history. We assume, for example, that the cost of medical care will continue to rise. And we assume that future medical resources will be inadequate to meet all needs. And we therefore assume that someone (a person, a set of persons, or the market on its own) will ultimately make the tough decisions about who gets care and who doesn’t.

I listed those assumptions in the order that I believe they are likely to become invalid. As I wrote on this subject not too long ago:

I would guess that fewer than 20% of the problems that doctors routinely encounter account for 80% (or more) of the time they spend with patients, and that many of these would be good candidates for automating. Offloading 80% of the tasks doctors currently perform would be the equivalent of having five times as many doctors on hand to apply their expertise to the treatment and prevention of illness. The total amount of medical care available would increase geometrically. And, since the vast majority of this care would be automated, the total cost of care would plummet.

Most people aren’t comfortable with the idea of automated health care. It’s sounds risky and dehumanizing. Of course, looking back, online banking sounded pretty risky and dehumanizing when it was first introduced. But now that many of us have been doing it for a while, we understand the difference between the simple tasks that are easily handled in the interactive environment and the more complex ones that require talking to a human being or (as a last resort) actually showing up in person at the bank. Obviously, medical care is much more complicated than banking. But information technology is much better at handling complex tasks than it was in the recent past, and in the near future will be far more so.

A health care reform initiative that I could get excited about would be one that recognizes the incredible potential of technology, especially information technology, to make health care massively more available and less expensive. But solving the health care problem turns out to be only one good reason for pursuing cutting edge artificial intelligence research directed at automating health care.

In a recent blog post, Michael Anissimov writes about the risks involved in having sentience emerge in an AI system used for the kinds of applications that currently represent the leading edge in practical (narrow) AI research:

An AI that maximizes money for an account, optimizes traffic flow patterns, murders terrorists, and the like, might become a problem when it copies itself onto millions of computers worldwide and starts using fab labs to print out autonomous robots programmed by it. It only did this because of what you told it to do — whatever that might be. It can do that better when it has millions of copies of itself on every computer within reach. It might even decide to just hold off on the fab labs and develop full-blown molecular nanotechnology based on data sets it gains by hacking into university computers, or physics and chemistry textbooks alone. After all, an AI recently built by Cornell University researchers has already independently rediscovered the laws of physics just by watching a pendulum swing. By the time roughly human-level self-improving AIs are created, likely a decade or more from now, the infrastructure of the physical world will be even more intimately connected with the Internet, so the new baby will have plenty of options to get its goals done, and — best of all — it will be unkillable.

Once an AI with a simplistic goal system surpasses the capability of humans around it, all bets are off. It will no longer have any reason to listen to them unless they already programmed it to in a full-proof way, a way where it wants to listen to them because it needs to to fulfill its utility function.

A more basic example given is an artificial intelligence which has been programmed to build certain structures on the moon, and given no other instructions. So from its point of view, finding better and better ways to build more and more of these moon constructs is good, and all other considerations are irrelevant. All of which means that this machine will build its moon-towers right on top of the crushed bodies of the lunar colonists and never give the matter a second thought.

Yes, it’s the Mad Robot scenario. But you see, the robot isn’t really mad, although as Michael points out, it might well be — from our point of view — a complete psychopath. The robot is working in a completely sane, logical, and consistent way on a very simple set of goals without the benefit our moral sensibilities. These sensibilities, it turns out, are hugely complex and we won’t necessarily find an adequate way to encode them before the emergence of the first human-level AI.

Failing to achieve a truly moral AI who seeks to build towers on the moon, we want to make sure that we at least create an AI who seeks to build towers on the moon without killing anybody. That is to say “without killing anybody” (along with “without stealing non-moon-tower designated funds” and possibly something like “without ripping other planets apart in order to get more moon-tower materials” to give just a couple of examples) actually becomes part of the goal. So then building moon towers is not enough. The AI’s utility function will be satisfied if it creates a moon tower a certain way, but not if it goes about doing it the wrong way.

So we want anti-terrorist AI systems who take out sleeper cells, but understand that it’s no good if they take out Grandma’s bridge club in the process; likewise we want trading systems which will stop at almost nothing when it comes to maximizing profits, with that “almost” including things like, say, rendering the US dollar completely worthless.

However, no matter how carefully we go about creating these complex goal systems, there is always the possibility of unintended consequences. So we have to be extremely careful.

All of which brings us back to the subject of automating health care. If we start dedicating cutting-edge AI technology towards increasing human health and making more and more kinds of treatment easier and more widely available, we will not only achieve the benefits I described earlier, we will also face the possibility that this health care AI achieves sentience and “goes mad.”

So then we would have a greater-than-human intelligence working non-stop to make itself better and better at making us better and better. Okay, granted, there’s still an awful lot that can go wrong with that scenario. But if we were to program enough “withouts” into that system, I’d say there’s a pretty good upside there, too. I’d feel a lot better about a sentient AI emerging with this set of goals than any that I can think of that are currently being addressed by real-world artificial intelligence applications.

Everybody got that? Poisonous spider bites: still bad for you.

Continue to avoid these.

A heart?

A liver?

A pancreas?

Nope.

Chances are, it will be a tooth:

Regenerating a whole tooth is no less complicated than rebuilding a whole heart, says Songtao Shi of the University of Southern California, who heads a team working on creating such a tooth.

Not only do you have to create smart tissue (nerves), strong tissue (ligaments) and soft tissue (pulp), you’ve got to build enamel — by far the hardest structural element in the body. And you have to have openings for blood vessels and nerves. And you have to make the whole thing stick together. And you have to anchor it in bone. And then you have to make the entire arrangement last a lifetime in the juicy stew of bacteria that is your mouth.

It’s a nuisance, but researchers are closing in on it. In fact, they think the tooth will probably be the first complex organ to be completely regenerated from stem cells. In part this is because teeth are easily accessible — say ahhhhh. So are adult stem cells, found abundantly in both wisdom and baby teeth — no embryos required, and your immune system won’t reject your own cells.

Nobody is predicting when the first whole tooth will be grown in a human, although five to 10 years is a common guess. “The whole tooth — we’ve got a long way to go,” says Shi.

But his team is pursuing what he believes is a practical and immediate result: growing important parts of teeth that he thinks people will want to use right away. They’re working on creating a living root from scratch. “I think it will take a year,” Shi says. “Depends on how lucky we are, and how good we are.”

The only downside here is that many of us had our wisdom teeth removed in early adulthood as recommended by our dentists, so the stem cells needed to create a new tooth won’t be available for us. We can only hope that there will be continued development of techniques for converting mature cells into stem cells. Plus, if regenerated teeth are on the horizon, the other organs mentioned above can’t be far behind.

In fact, we’ve been tracking this progress for some time.

Remember the tooth!

[Update: Phil here. Please don't ask me what the photo and caption above mean. I have no idea. I believe an uncredited co-blogger has generously added them to this entry!]

Check out the video.

It’s news like this that makes us say, “If you’re not excited about the future you’re not paying attention.”

A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed.

They’re being careful not to say the man was cured, but its a remarkable recovery for a guy that was pretty far gone. It was advanced skin cancer that had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs. Apparently he’s healthy now.

This is a similar therapy to that proposed by Dr. Zheng Cui. Dr. Cui has proposed that the healthiest immune cells might be found outside of the patient – in the bodies of young healthy immune cell donors who are found to have particularly strong anti-cancer immune systems. These donations would be collected seasonally because it seems that sunlight makes a significant difference in the potency of our immune systems.

Last November Phil had the opportunity to interview Dr. Cui both in print and for the FastForward Podcast (here’s the show, here’s the show notes).

This is Fuji the dolphin. Fuji lost her tail due to cancer. After two failed attempts, Bridgestone Tire Company was able to come up with this silicon rubber tail. Fuji accepted it and can swim almost as well as before. She lives in Okinawa.

And here’s CBS video coverage.

Fuji is not the only animal to receive a prosthetic. This is a Romanian stork named Uzonka:

And the elephant Motola was injured by a land mine.

Engineers have often taken animal designs for our own use. Now they can use their designs to aid animals. And the field of animal prosthetics is likely to increase our understanding of body mechanics more generally.