Futures Archive

September 20, 2007

More on Curing Cancer

Here's more evidence of the amazing progress that is being made in the fight against cancer. A newly discovered type of cancer-killing immune system cell is now being manipulated and tested and it appears to be successful in killing cancer cells permanently. Supposedly this cure may be ready for market in two years. This looks very promising. Can you imagine a world without cancer? Or a world where people will admire scientists and researchers rather than airhead celebrities? Please see the article at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/19/ncancer219.xml

August 24, 2007

Artificial Life

Yes, that's right – artificial life.  According to AP Science writer Seth Borenstein, scientists are currently working on producing artificial life from scratch and they expect results in 3 to 10 years.  The idea is to create synthetic life forms, made from the basic chemicals of DNA.  Once these scientists have duplicated God's work, they will be able to tailor make the new life to a wide variety of tasks, some probably not even yet envisioned.

The article notes that to create artificial life you need a container or membrane for the cell, a genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, and a metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and changes it to energy.  The scientists believe that once the container is made, Darwinian evolution will take over as the new life form begins reproducing itself.  Then the scientists will sit back and watch to learn what will occur.

It sounds rather scary to me, but also very interesting.  Here's the article: http://www.wtop.com/?nid=220&sid=1225287

Cancer Vaccine

An article in the August 11, 2007 issue of Science News by Patrick Barry advises that the long sought possibility of a vaccine against cancer may finally become a reality.  According to the article several new drugs when paired with vaccines enable the vaccines to spur the body's immune system to attack cancer cells.  Cancer tumors have learned to disguise themselves as healthy tissues rather than alien invaders and this fools the killer T cells that function as the immune system's attack dogs.  The new combination of drugs and vaccines subvert the cancer's defenses and allow the killer T's to recognize and destroy the unhealthy tissues.

According to the article, provisional testing on human patients in Amsterdam has been successful.  This is just a beginning but if it works out cancer patients may be able to kill the disease with a vaccine, and people who don't have cancer may be able to prevent it with the same vaccine. 

Isn't that amazing?

June 26, 2007

What will the future be like?  Nobody knows.  But if we understand history, and if we look at current trends, we can get some ideas.  As a science fiction writer with a background in history, government and international affairs, I spend a lot of time thinking about it.  I also spend a lot of time keeping track of current scientific events and trends.  I have been increasingly amazed at what is out there.  We appear to be on the brink of an era of astounding scientific progress that is going to transform our world in ways never before predicted.  The world of science is meeting and overtaking the world of science fiction.

This is a very exciting period to be alive, on the brink of a new scientific age.  I call this section of my website "Futures" because I feel compelled to write down some of my thoughts about this brave new age that is coming at us quickly, whether we like it or not.  Although I haven't set this up as a chat site, I welcome any comments and if they are of interest I will add them to the site.  Maybe we can make this a chat site later.  For now just e-mail andrion2@cox.net if you wish to comment. 

A little background first:  As a science fiction writer, I love to write.  I write about people because that's what interests me and I think people are what make a story interesting to the reader, not technology.  My SF series Soldier of the Legion is primarily about people, for that reason.  However, believable advanced science and technology is what defines science fiction, so the series has plenty of that as well as lots of action. I recently attended the RavenCon Science Fiction Convention in Richmond, VA, and sat on two panels covering Military SF and Hard SF. Military SF is of course science fiction that includes military action and technology. Hard SF is not SF that is difficult to read, but SF that includes believable advanced science and technology as part of the story line. To me, that is the definition of SF itself, because without it you just have space opera or maybe a Western set on Jupiter. One of the panelists was Roger Sawyer who is Mr. Hard SF. His stories are wonderfully done and he is a gentleman and a real nice guy. So, to summarize, I believe a good SF story has to have believable science and technology, or it's not SF, but it also has to have realistic, sympathetic characters or the reader may lose interest.

All right, how do you get believable science and technology if you're writing about a future that no-one has yet seen?  I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that I have a clear view of the future that I envision for my SF series.  I have a general idea about how things work in my series so my problem is not what to imagine but how to explain the technology to the reader in a way that sounds plausible. Keep in mind that science that is sufficiently advanced can not initially be distinguished from magic to an observer from an earlier era.  It then becomes necessary for me to explain the science to the reader, and that's tricky.  If I give too many details of some imagined way-out advanced technology, some scientist may say it's impossible or very unlikely.  If I give just enough hints at how it works to appear plausible, then we're successful.  Scientific progress is now so fast that there is not very much that can be ruled out as impossible for the future.   However the info I give must track with the latest scientific developments. 

Remember Jules Verne?  He did hard science fiction.  His SF was based on the science they had at that time.  He had his characters travel to the Moon with 19th Century technology.  Looking back at that science now, it appears silly.  At the time, it was cutting-edge.  We now know that there are going to be plenty of scientific advances in the future – with science that will probably be indistinguishable from magic, to us.  So I believe in tempering my "hard" SF with plenty of imagination.

OK, back to the future: although I'm not a scientist, I spend a lot of time keeping track of the latest scientific developments. If you are even vaguely interested in science, you should be aware that science is now moving at astounding speed and making amazing progress in so many fields due to starts made in the human genome project and advances in quantum physics. I'd recommend Science News, a weekly, and Scientific American, a monthly.  If you're under 20, you will certainly see within your lifetimes (and maybe even within mine), astounding progress in the following fields:

• quantum entanglement (instant communication bypassing the speed of light)
• quantum computing (almost infinite data capacity)
• quantum cryptography (100% secure)
• quantum teleportation (experimentally verified)
• invisibility through light manipulation and other means (lots of progress)
• electronic weapons with no moving parts and incredible rates of fire (already done)
• antimatter weaponry (our Air Force is interested)
• antimatter spaceflight propulsion (advanced progress)
• Laser weaponry (advanced progress)
• electronic sex (no, I'm not making this up)
• The Scientific Conquest of Death (see below)
• Life extension & immortality
• the conquest of all diseases
• gene stimulation to prompt cell division/growth to maintain youth forever (see immortality above)
• stem cell advances to generate organs, re-grow nerves, regenerate damaged limbs and organs, and, in general, stop and reverse aging (again, immortality)
• artificial nanotech red blood cells to increase health
• artificial nanotech white blood cells to fight disease
• chimeras (animal-human hybrids) (progress is not always a good thing)
• brain scans to read minds, end crime, and bring about either true justice (accurately identifying and punishing violent criminals) or true tyranny (accurately spotting political thought crimes and punishing the guilty)
• producing identikit pictures of criminal suspects through a speck of DNA that reveals sex, race, ancestry, hair and eye color, height etc
• improving memory
• pumping up the human body to near Superman strength
• bionic suits for old folks and soldiers
• and my all time favorite for future horror stories, bioweapons that target specific ethnic groups.

All the above subjects are now under active scientific investigation and progress is being made. Although artificial wormholes and time travel is not under active study as far as I know, both have been declared to be theoretically possible by serious scientists (see the book How to Build a Time Machine, by Paul Davies).  Many of the above subjects appear in my series, Soldier of the Legion.

Let's examine some of the above subjects.  I don’t have any brilliant insights into these subjects, but I would like to summarize some of the latest info I have on the subject.  We can start with Immortality, which is always of interest. 

Immortality

In my SF series, Legion soldiers are immortal, and all citizens of the Confederation of Free Worlds are rendered immortal upon coming of age – assuming they want it.  Of course immortality does not guarantee you will live forever.  If your head is blown off with a tacstar, or you're cooked by starmass, you die just like any mortal.  But, assuming you can avoid the lasers, you will live forever thanks to ConFree's state of the art life science. Unlikely?  Not at all.  I've always believed that with sufficiently advanced science we can banish diseases, postpone death, prolong youth, and eventually bring about immortality.  In Soldier of the Legion, death is a primitive horror from the past.  And guess what – modern scientists are currently closing in on the secrets of life and death, and making amazing progress.  There is so much progress, in so many different fields, that the categories morph into one another and I've found it hard to maintain a notebook about current efforts to bring about immortality.  Then I found a book that pulled many of these efforts together. 

When I saw the title, The Scientific Conquest of Death, I thought this is exactly what I need.  Then I saw it was edited by something called The Immortality Institute, and I thought, Oh no.  I had a quick vision of a brilliant but flawed cult leader urging his sheep-like followers to keep scanning the night skies for the flying saucers that are coming to rescue them from this evil world, so they can get an early start on mixing the  kool-aid. However I persevered and discovered that the book was divided into chapter essays written by scientists, not cultists, all of whom are working seriously on the issue of immortality.  I bought the book and I'm glad I did.  So don't be put off by the 'Immortality Institute' which, as its name implies, is dedicated to the scientific conquest of death and has nothing to do with cults or flying saucers.  About half of the book is science and about half provides perspectives on mortality and immortality.  I found the science parts most interesting.  I won't try and summarize the findings but will recommend the book and mention briefly some of the high points.

Michael Rose, PhD, writes on biological immortality.  He notes that some organisms are always immortal – organisms that reproduce by splitting their bodies into two similar parts never age.  We've known this for decades, but there is now reason to believe that we can influence evolution to extend life-spans.  He believes that there are now good reasons for thinking that immortality is fundamentally possible. 

Aubrey de Grey, PhD believes that in 15-20 years anti-aging medicine will be able to restore aging persons to conditions they enjoyed in early adulthood.  He does not believe aging can be cured, but that it can be controlled, and that involuntary death will be avoided.

Joao Pedro de Magalhaes, PhD believes we will eventually understand the human aging process.  He comments on gene therapy, cell therapy and nanotechnology.  Gene therapy appears very promising and has had remarkable results in experiments.  Cell therapy includes stem cells which can create practically all components of a human body in the lab.  Stem cells can regenerate and repair damaged tissues and appear to have unlimited promise.  Artificial nanostructures should be able to drive chemical reactions capable of reversing aging.  He notes the ultimate goal is to reverse molecular and cellular changes that occur as we age and changing the genome of our cells to prevent aging from happening again. 

Michael D West, PhD  points out that we all have immortal cells within us, an immortal gene-line, and that these cells, barring accidents, never die.  However evolution and specialization led early on to a change in cells.  Some of them became 'somatic' or specialized cells, which could not reproduce but were useful in protecting the organism.  That's when death first appeared.  Dr. West sees great promise in work currently underway on stem cells, embryonic stem cells, and therapeutic cloning.

Robert A Freitas Jr, J.D. believes the greatest advances on countering biological aging and death will come from nanomedicine. He has already designed nanorobots to carry oxygen throughout the body.  Besides medical use, these would allow a swimmer to hold his breath underwater for up to four hours or sprint at Olympic speed up to 12 minutes without breathing.  He has also designed a nanorobot that functions as an artificial white cell.  Flooding the bloodtstream with these nanobots will clear the system of all bloodborne pathogens in minutes or hours.  They would be a thousand times faster than natural leukocytes.  Dr. Freitas believes that these devices could eliminate 99% of all medically preventable conditions that lead to death, and with annual checkups and cleanouts your biological age could be restored once a year to whatever physiological age you prefer – late teens or early twenties, for example.  Expected age of death would be pushed back to maybe 900 years.      

Raymond Kurzweil, PhD also believes that nanobots will lead us to augment and ultimately replace our organs.  He believes by 2030 reverse engineering of the human brain will have been completed and nonbiological intelligence will merge with our biological brains.  Our digestive system, for example, will ultimately prove to be unnecessary once nanobots inside us eliminate our waste products so we won't have to do that ourselves.   Dr. Kurzwell also speculates about getting rid of the heart, which is subject to breakdowns. 

William Sims Bainbridge, PhD sees progress towards cyberimmortality and comments on artificial intelligence.  He believes three or four decades from now we may be routinely transferring human personalities into robots. 

Marvin L Minsky, PhD writes about robots inheriting the earth.  He sees us making new genes and installing them in the future and, possibly, replacing the brain.  He speculates on the limits of human memory and the future of intelligence. 

Bryan Wowk, PhD comments on cryonics or medical time travel in which the body is frozen until such time as a cure can be found for whatever ailed it.  Although cryonics has been discredited Dr. Wowk notes that scientific progress may still be possible in this field. 

Well, I hadn't planned on doing a book review but this was an interesting book and I'd certainly recommend it if you're interested in the subject of human aging, death and immortality.  I'll add comments on some of the other subjects above as I have time.     

By the way, I am interested in encouraging young writers or those who might want to become writers. Please look in the interview section of my website for advice and stories about how I improved my writing and eventually became a published author. It's not easy but it can be done, especially if you enjoy writing. That's the key – you have to love it.