https://archive.is/aN8jL
"Hype springs eternal in medicine, but lately the horizon of new possibility
seems almost blindingly bright. “I’ve been running my research lab for almost
30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California,
Berkeley. “And I can say that throughout that period of time, I’ve just never
experienced what we’re seeing over just the last five years.”
A Nobel laureate, Doudna is known primarily for Crispr, the gene-editing Swiss
Army knife that has been called “a word processor” for the human genome and
that she herself describes as “a technology that literally enables the
rewriting of the code of life.” The work for which Doudna shared the Nobel
Prize was published more than a decade ago, in 2012, opening up what seemed
like an almost limitless horizon for Crispr-powered therapies and cures. But
surveying the recent landscape of scientific breakthroughs, she says the last
half-decade has been more remarkable still: “I think we’re at an extraordinary
time of accelerating discoveries.”
The pandemic has exhausted many Americans of medicine, and it has become common
to process the last few years as a saga of defeat and failure. And yet these
brutal years — which brought more than a million American deaths and probably
20 million deaths worldwide, and seemed to return even the hypermodern citadels
of the wealthy West to something like the experience of premodern plague —
might also represent an unprecedented watershed of medical innovation. Beyond
Crispr and Covid vaccines, there are countless potential applications of mRNA
tools for other diseases; a new frontier for immunotherapy and next-generation
cancer treatment; a whole new world of weight-loss drugs; new insights and
drug-development pathways to chase with the help of machine learning; and
vaccines heralded as game-changing for some of the world’s most intractable
infectious diseases."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-malaria-belize-crime-mexico-city-bison-montana/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
