IFTF's Future Now

Enhancement isn't just for athletes any more

For years there's been anecdotal evidence, and a couple surveys, suggesting growing use of drugs like Ritalin and Provigil by undergraduates looking to get an edge over the competition. Now, some faculty are starting to claim that professors have started doing it, too:

While caffeine reigns as the supreme drug of the professoriate, some university faculty members have started popping "smart" pills to enhance their mental energy and ability to work long hours, according to two University of Cambridge scientists.

In a commentary published in the journal Nature last month, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir revealed the results of their informal survey of a handful of colleagues who study drugs that help people perform better mentally....

But brain boosting raises hackles in some parts of academe. "It smells to me a lot like taking steroids for physical prowess," said Barbara Prudhomme White, an associate professor of occupational therapy at the University of New Hampshire, who has studied the abuse of Ritalin by college students. After recent revelations about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball, she sees parallels between athletes and assistant professors. "You're expected to publish and teach, and the stakes are high. So young professors have to work their tails off to get that golden nugget of tenure."

The poll was not meant to be a comprehensive study, said Ms. Morein-Zamir, a research associate at Cambridge. Rather, the essay, "Professor's Little Helper," was intended to provoke a public discussion of whether society in general, and universities in particular, should regulate the use of available compounds and medications that might be developed in the future. "If a drug helps you be more alert but also make better decisions, how does society feel about that?" she asked.

The essay, published in Nature, is a rewardingly geeky piece that includes a long discussion of how these drugs work, and what dangers exist in their use.

Technorati Tags: brain, drugs, university

Human evolution is speeding up

The Guardian reports on a new study of the pace of human evolution.

Humans are evolving more quickly than at any time in history, researchers say. In the past 5,000 years, humans have evolved up to 100 times more quickly than any time since the split with the ancestors of modern chimpanzees 6m years ago, a team from the University of Wisconsin found.

The study also suggests that human races in different parts of the world are becoming more genetically distinct, although this is likely to reverse in future as populations become more mixed....

The researchers analysed data from the international haplotype map of the human genome, and analysed genetic markers in 270 people from four groups: Han Chinese, Japanese, Africa's Yoruba and northern Europeans.

They found that at least 7% of human genes have undergone recent evolution.... Some of the changes were tracked back to just 5,000 years ago, and "today they are in 30 or 40% of people because they [are] such an advantage," said Hawks.

The most interesting line in the piece, though, is this reflection on evolution and built environment:

"The widespread assumption that human evolution has slowed down because it's easier to live and we've conquered nature is absolutely not true. We didn't conquer nature, we changed it in ways that created new selection pressures on us," said anthropologist Dr John Hawks, who led the study.

Technorati Tags: evolution

Finally, an inexpensive solution to the Chinese Hamster Ovary cell transportation problem

Wired reports on a impressive piece of improvisational science: while waiting for their lab's equipment to arrive, UC Merced engineering professor Michelle Khine, an expert in microfluidic systems, and her research group "designed complicated patterns in Auto CAD, printed them onto Shrinky Dinks, and then heated the plastic toys in an inexpensive oven."

As the sheets became smaller, the lines of print would bulge out. Taller and more pronounced, the miniaturized pattern served as a perfect mould for forming rounded, narrow channels in PDMS -- a clear, synthetic rubber.

In addition to making some simpler devices, Khine and her team emblazoned a Christmas tree design into a piece of PDMS and showed how it can blend different types of food coloring to make a rainbow pattern. Since microfluidic devices are sometimes used for biological research, the young professor also showed that Chinese Hamster Ovary cells can flow through through the narrow channels.

An article published in the Royal College of Chemistry's journal Lab on a Chip describes the lab's

rapid and non-photolithographic approach to microfluidic pattern generation by leveraging the inherent shrinkage properties of biaxially oriented polystyrene thermoplastic sheets [those would be the Shrinky Dinks-- ed.]. This novel approach yields channels deep enough for mammalian cell assays, with demonstrated heights up to 80 µm. Moreover, we can consistently and easily achieve rounded channels, multi-height channels, and channels as thin as 65 µm in width. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of this simple microfabrication approach by fabricating a functional gradient generator. The whole process—from device design conception to working device—can be completed within minutes....

Unlike the expensive setup and laborious processing required to make the silicon wafers, this approach only requires a laser-jet printer and a toaster oven, and can be completed within minutes. Moreover, we can achieve multi-height designs within the device, which typically requires a laborious and iterative process using standard lithographic approaches.

A few weeks ago I pointed out Attila Csordás' article on DIY biology. This is another data-point suggesting that the DIY biology world isn't close-- if you're ingenious and have the toys at hand, it's here.

Technorati Tags: biology, biotech, innovation, DIY, users

DIY Biology

We do a lot of stuff here at the Institute on user-driven innovation. As one of the first nodes on the ARPANet-- the original "users are driving innovation" playground-- and a place that's followed the evolution of online collaboration pretty much since Day 1, it's been interesting to see the concept go mainstream in the last couple years. Now it's clearly spreading from IT and the Web to other areas, including biology. Attila Csordás encouraged bio-DIYers, "do not hesitate:"

[I]n the not so distant future, self-aware citizens may manage their own stem cells, grow them in the garage, and store them in the fridge. It could be a form of autonomous medical self-insurance.

Incredible as it may sound, the basics of molecular biology - what is DNA, how genetic information is coded, how it turns to RNA, which base triplets fits to which amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, that make up your body - can be learnt within 2 hours. Another intensive two weeks in an official lab with an instructor and you can work with them.

Csordás argues that if you can learn the basics of PCR and in vitro cell culture-- both of which are now relatively cheap, well-known technologies-- you can do it. Baris Karadogan (at From Istanbul to Sand Hill Road) draws out some implications:

Welcome to open source science, welcome to do it yourself biology.... With so much information on the Internet and such ready access to scientific data, what Attila wrote about could very well be commonplace in 5-10 years. This is a world where people could be "playing around" with their own biology. I see two big impacts right away.

First, tinkering is the best way to invent things, and this would really push the envelope in scientific and practical discovery. Second, if you think governments are having a hard time figuring out the laws to govern file sharing, let's see how they'll deal with "amateur genetic engineering". This will be a huge issue. Imagine people coming up with "user generated biotechnology".

Update: Attila points me to a recent interview he conducted with biotech startup founder Jim Hardy. "Make no mistake," he argues: "biotech is the next IT."

Technorati Tags: biotech, innovation, users

The ultimate unintended consequence

Futurists love stories of unintended consequences. I don't think there are many disciplines whose practitioners traffic in anecdotes that appear to undermine their own credibility, but professional futurists are nothing if not modest about their abilities to predict the future, and tend instead to emphasize the contingency of any forecast, and the role that human agency and choice in shaping the future. (An alternate explanation is that we're just masochistic.) Stories about unintended consequences are warnings about the non-deterministic, unpredictable nature of the future.

So I was very interested to read about a recent study arguing that a mutation that made our (i.e., Homo sapiens') ancestors immune to certain retroviruses is partly responsible for our susceptibility to HIV:

The ability of a virus to cause disease in one host but not another is a poorly understood but common phenomenon. Scientists have recently found the remnants of a virus present in the genomes of chimpanzees and gorillas but absent in humans. Humans, it appears, evolved resistance to this virus millions of years ago. Paradoxically, however, the evolution of resistance to that now extinct virus may have made us more susceptible to HIV today.

Scientists have been studying a retrovirus called PtERV, remnants of which can be found in the genome of chimps. From what they can tell, there were several PtERV epidemics about three million years ago, and the genomes of chimps and other great apes still cary fragments of PtERV. Humans, however, don't have it.

Why? It appears that our ancestors developed a resistance to it. "The PtERV virus," the Guardian explains, "can only successfully infect an animal if it avoids destruction by a protein called TRIM5alpha... [which] acts a kind of gatekeeper for the cell." In apes, that protein does a poor job of blocking PtERV; the human version, in contrast, does quite well.

However, there's a catch.

HIV belongs to the same family of retroviruses as PtERV, so the scientists were also interested in finding out whether the gatekeeping activity of the protein would keep out the Aids virus. What they found was that although the modern human TRIM5alpha protein was very effective at blocking the ape virus, it was very poor at blocking HIV infection. Conversely, the ape form of the gatekeeping protein blocked HIV infection but allowed in the PtERV virus. It seems that when one door was closed to infection, another one was opened.

In other words,

That mutation came at a hidden cost. It may have saved our ancestors from extinction, but it cast a shadow into the 20th century when a new virus, HIV, emerged. The gene that saved our ancestors from the ancient viral scourge provided little protection against the new virus.

Technorati Tags: epidemics, evolution, science

File under, "Bad uses of technology"

According to Australian newspaper The Age, "Lawmakers in Indonesia's Papua are mulling the selective use of chip implants in HIV carriers to monitor their behaviour in a bid to keep them from infecting others."

John Manangsang, a doctor who is helping to prepare a new healthcare regulation bill for Papua's provincial parliament, said that unusual measures were needed to combat the virus.

"We in the government in Papua have to think hard on ways to provide protection to people from the spread of the disease.... Some of the infected people experience a change of behaviour and can turn more aggressive and would not think twice of infecting others.... Among one of the means being considered is the monitoring of those infected people who can pose a danger to others.... The use of chip implants is one of the ways to do so."

The National AIDS Council does report an increase in the number of HIV/AIDS cases, but unless these are chips featuring a level of hitherto unheard-of sophistication (brain scanning? real-time analysis of blood chemistry, blood pressure, and heartbeat?) combined with super-accurate GPS, it's not clear that this could work. Putting ordinary RFID tags in people tells you whether they're within range of an RFID reader, but nothing else; and unless you're going to blanket a country (or just a city) with readers, that's not very useful.

[Hat tip to Sean]

Technorati Tags: RFID

Medical innovation: Could the U.S. slip?

The Washington Post's Amar Bakshi writes about the Artemis Medical Foundation, an about-to-open clinical research center in India. It's an interesting piece for two things. The first is its blunt critique of American medical research: Artemis founder Kushagra Katariya (formerly a professor at the U. of Miami) declares, “Opportunities to develop cutting edge [medical practices] are fast disappearing in…the United States."

He says that when it comes to developing a new, improved way to treat patients, he can do it “quicker, develop it better, and have the ingredients to really take it much further" than he could in the same amount of time in the U.S.

Here, he can combine his clinical practice with scientific research and technological development, all at a breakneck pace.

"Clinical research and translational research is down 70% in the U.S.," he tells me, laying out two primary explanations:

First, he blames “the lobbies, restrictions, confidentiality problems, insurance companies regulating what needs to be done, what can be done, what cannot be done…the usual ambulance chasing that occurs." In the U.S. there’s too much red tape.

Second, there’s an “inhibition of intellect coming together.” Because “provisions for funding are few and far between," there is a huge amount of “talent divided among 200 universities" that don't always collaborate.

This, in addition to "super-specialization," creates a "silo-mentality" between and within leading institutions. “Clinical applicators at the bedside” and the “researchers in the lab” are like “two parallel railway tracks that never meet” even though they’re working toward the same goal, improved patient care. In India, he says, ideas are fresh and different sectors are more amenable to being brought together to “beat the disease.”...

This sense that the funding, institutional, and reward structures for scientific research have become too conservative-- not in the political sense, but in the sense of being risk-averse, incrementalist, and overly fond of specialization-- is something I've heard in virtually every workshop I've done with scientists. It's a theme I especially hear with young scientists-- and it's strong enough to now serve as a disincentive for some of them to stay in academia or pure research.

(The article doesn't ask whether that speed is a consequence of patients bearing higher risks. An American-trained doctor working in India comments that while "India could be a cheaper option" for "routine medical procedures... one has to realize that ordinarily no one is held accountable if something goes wrong. So do it at your own risk.")

The second interesting thing in the article is Katariya's perspective on the global movement of talent. Because of low wages, there are still lots of Indian-trained doctors who leave for better-paying jobs in Europe, the Middle East, or North America. But

does Katariya stress keeping doctors in India? “No,” he says. “We want people to get experiences everywhere else that the world has to offer, but at the end of the day…we want to bring it back to India....because the local talent, the local ingredients exist to be able to create that stuff [new treatment methods] over here much faster than at a Hopkins, or Cleveland Clinic, or a Stanford or the big names you hear about in the U.S.”

This assumption that flattening the world of science-- to borrow from Tom Friedman-- will be good for everyone is one that I've heard, with greater or lesser undertones of anxiety, among senior scientists and policy people in Europe and the U.S.

Technorati Tags: science, India, medical tourism, brain circulation

Battle of the Biotech (Super)Clusters

Nature Biotechnology has a great article about this week's announcement of Massachusetts' new economic development initiative - the Supercluster. "From the floor of the Biotechnology Industry Organization's (BIO) annual meeting in Boston, Governor Deval Patrick and Mayor Thomas Menino announced that Massachusetts's Supercluster will be getting a $1 billion secret weapon to fight those clandestinely working to undermine the state's lead in biotech."

Fight whom? Not terrorists, but the next worst thing: the Californian Institute for Regenerative Medicine which according to Nature "threatens to suck companies, people and jobs out of
the Boston metropolis' heart and allow California to usurp the
Massachusetts area's crown as the number-one biotech cluster."


Supercluster is a $1 billion package of public money to bring together "world-class science, talent, mentors and funding, quality of life, laboratory and office space, inter- and intra-institute collaboration, established biotech firms and support services, access to patients and markets, and last but by no means least, tax incentives."

There's an awful lot at stake for Beantown. According to the Boston Globe (which has not-as-good, but free coverage of the announcement), while only 1 in 50 Americans lives in Massachusetts, fully 1 in 7 biotech jobs does.

The state does seem to have a lot of interesting ideas for investing in biotech:

• The Massachusetts
  BioManufacturing Center in Lowell, which has incubated 20 companies take research to the manufacturing stage.
• a Life Sciences Investment Fund
• A Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center that helps entrepreneus navigate the new venture capital enviroment - where investors shy away from products in early stages of development, leaving medical patents rotting on the shelves.
  

This topic is particularly heavy on my mind right now, as I am preparing to go to Barcelona in early July to give a talk on "the geography of creativity" at the annual meeting of the International Association of Science Parks.

Biopolis and the new urban science

I spent last week in Singapore, speaking at a conference on RFID in Asia, and visiting with various futures groups in the Singaporean government. But the thing I was really looking forward to doing in my free time was not shopping (though the shopping is very good), nor the food (which was excellent): rather, it was the chance to see Biopolis.

biopolis sky bridge, via flickr

Biopolis is one of the cornerstones in the Singaporean government's effort to turn the city-state into a regional (indeed, global) center for biotech research. Novartis and SKB already occupy parts of two buildings; five others are mainly occupied by labs run by A*Star; and two more are under construction. Over the long run, they want to build more local talent in the basic sciences underlying biotech, and support the development of a native biotech companies.

map of biopolis, via flickr

Not only is it architecturally very exciting-- the best contemporary Singaporean architecture is all post-Rem Koolhaus and Zaha Hadid swooping lines and glass, Biopolis also beautifully exemplifies a couple trends in the design of spaces for science that Anthony Townsend and I wrote about in the 2006 Ten Year Forecast (warning: it's a huge PDF-- 24MB).

Technorati Tags: biotech, innovation, science, science cities, Singapore

RFID gets smaller and edible... and bigger

A little over a year ago the Institute published a set of reports on the future of RFID. One of the things we argued was that in the future, RFID tags would be seen by consumers as just one of a kind Great Chain of (Digital) Being, part of a much bigger spectrum of information technologies that lived in or connected to the physical world. In addition to passive and active RFID tags, we'd have extremely small, disposable RFID tags; tags that had enough processing power and memory to almost be very small computers; RFID tags that were tailored to different functions and industries (e.g., security, asset management, object provenance and history and everything in between.

This, in turn, would affect public perceptions of RFID. Among other things, RFID would probably seem less alien and intrusive in a world in which lots of objects have digital functionalities. And if designed and used well, the consumer benefits could definitely outweigh the disadvantages.

Two data-points suggest that RFID may undergo (to switch from Renaissance to contemporary biological metaphors) a Cambrian explosion in the next few years.

First, Hitachi has announced development of what it's calling "RFID powder," RFID tags "measuring 0.05 x 0.05 mm" and 5 microns thick, "which they aim to begin marketing in 2 to 3 years."

By relying on semiconductor miniaturization technology and using electron beams to write data on the chip substrates, Hitachi was able to create RFID chips 64 times smaller than their currently available 0.4 x 0.4 mm mu-chips. Like mu-chips, which have been used as an anti-counterfeit measure in admission tickets, the new chips have a 128-bit ROM for storing a unique 38-digit ID number.

The new chips are also 9 times smaller than the prototype chips Hitachi unveiled last year, which measure 0.15 x 0.15 mm.

The second data-point is a patent filing by Kodak for an edible-- and more important, digestible-- RFID tag. (The patent describes it as a "System to monitor the ingestion of medicines") New Scientist reports that

The tags would be covered with soft gelatin that takes a while to dissolve in the stomach. After swallowing a tag a patient need only sit next to a radio source and receiver.

They stop working when exposed to gastric acid for a specific period of time, providing a subtle way to monitor a patient's digestive tract.

Kodak says that similar radio tags could also be embedded in an artificial knee or hip joint in such a way that they disintegrate as the joint does, warning of the need for more surgery. Attaching tags to ordinary pills could also help nurses confirm that a patient has really taken their medicine as ordered.

The Kodak patent describes the tags as

a system that uses intentionally fragile tags to provide useful information by identifying when such tags are destroyed. The system then responds to this basic change of state by providing a useful service. Such intentionally fragile tags can be composed of materials that can be not only be ingested but also digested with the understanding that break down is a desirable quality and one that enables the tag materials to be eliminated in the standard manner. Such a fragile tag that is also digestible lends itself to applications such as being included in objects meant to be ingested, such as pills, lozenges, and glycol strips.

The patent is mainly concerned with describing a system that would let health care providers (or insurance companies, or nursing home management) see that patients are taking their drugs, and also generate some feedback about how those drugs are interacting with the person's body. Personally, I'm skeptical that these systems are going to take off-- in their current incarnations (or imagined incarnations) they're at once too clunky, too invasive, and too easy to spoof-- but I think the more promising application is described later on:

A clearly appropriate application for such an embedded fragile tag is as part of a protective layer on top of bone 240 or other surface that experiences wear. In the case of bone, the wear is due to mechanical friction as well chemical reaction. In either case, there is value in ascertaining the breakdown of the surface of bone or of an artificial or natural bone replacement.

So the tags could essentially be used as sensors. But wait, there's more:

Other embodiments of mechanical interaction could be a fragile tag whose fragility is derived from response to external pressure. A typical application for such a fragile tag would be where following being embedded, such a fragile tag would function until a loss of blood pressure below a set limit occurred at which point the tag would be destroyed, giving an immediate indication of the metabolic state of the recipient of the fragile tag. Similar applications can be extrapolated for loss of air pressure in the lungs.

Other embodiments of mechanical interaction could further include a fragile tag that fails when temperature exceeds a certain limit. Compound fragile tags of this type could provide a rapid means of remotely and automatically monitoring internal body temperature.

An embodiment that combines aspects of mechanical and chemical fragility is the bio-reactive fragile tag. A casing, substrate, or component of the fragile tag would be designed to support the growth of a specific mold, fungus, bacteria or virus. The destruction of the fragile tag would then indicate the presence of the organism.

Somewhat whackier are the possible security applications:

An additional feature is the possible use of the embedded tag to monitor internal vibration in much the same manner as the Thermin listening device referred to in the background. Such vibration monitoring devices, functioning as a miniature stethoscope, can be remotely queried as originally used by Thermin in his U.S. Moscow embassy listening device.

It should be noted that fragile tags may not only be embedded surgically, but may be embedded by shooting or jabbing the body to insert the fragile RFID tag, thereby providing a safe and convenient method for testing the state of a body of a person or animal that would otherwise not cooperate in such test. An example of such an application would be an uncooperative animal that needs to be tested by a veterinarian or tagging an animal in the wild.

Or, it hardly need be said, a suspected criminal or terrorist whose food could be tagged.

One other thing jumped out at me: the term "intentionally fragile," which strikes me as a little note with with a big undertone. Normally, the last thing you want a product to be is fragile: that's what you design to avoid. Recognizing that fragility can, under the right conditions, be a feature rather than a bug, probably requires rethinking your approach to design.

But the main thing to note is this: the RFID tags that we've been arguing about are to the RFID world of a decade hence as the Altair computer is to today's world of laptops, desktops, handhelds, iPods, microprocessor-enabled automobile airbags, etc., etc..

[thanks to Sean Ness and Eugene Chang]

Technorati Tags: R&D, RFID

The reality of biotech

New York Times reviews Gary Pisano's new book, Science Business: The Promise, the Reality, and the Future of Biotech. The big claim of Science Business is that contrary to popular perceptions (or perceptions within the biotech world), biotech is actually

no more efficient at drug development than traditional big pharmaceutical companies. That conclusion runs contrary to popular belief that scrappy, driven biotechnology entrepreneurs can run rings around the bureaucratic drones of Big Pharma.

Biotechnology has been “one of the biggest money-losing industries in the history of mankind,” Arthur D. Levinson, chief executive of Genentech, told analysts in New York last year. He estimated that the biotech industry as a whole has lost nearly $100 billion since Genentech, the industry pioneer and one of its most successful companies, opened its doors in 1976. Only 54 of 342 publicly traded American biotech companies were profitable in 2006, according to Ernst & Young.

Most biotech enterprises face a host of daunting challenges. While they can work much more nimbly than their brethren in Big Pharma, they also lack some of the hard-won experience that large corporations bring to the drug pipeline. Moreover, biotech companies often aim at harder-to-conquer diseases and use more experimental technologies, further complicating their quests.

Technorati Tags: biotech, books, innovation, pharma

Imagining the future

The new speciality of neuroeconomics is generating lots of interesting results for economists; I've sometimes wondered if we might one day get a much better understanding of how we think about the future at a basic neurological level. Some Washington University scientists have been looking at exactly this question.

Imaging pinpoints brain regions that 'see the future'
Memory and future thought go 'hand-in-hand'

Human memory, the ability to recall vivid mental images of past experiences, has been studied extensively for more than a hundred years. But until recently, there's been surprisingly little research into cognitive processes underlying another form of mental time travel -- the ability to clearly imagine or "see" oneself participating in a future event.

Now, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have used advanced brain imaging techniques to show that remembering the past and envisioning the future may go hand-in-hand, with each process sparking strikingly similar patterns of activity within precisely the same broad network of brain regions.

"In our daily lives, we probably spend more time envisioning what we're going to do tomorrow or later on in the day than we do remembering, but not much is known about how we go about forming these mental images of the future," says Karl Szpunar, lead author of the study and a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.

"Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories."

[Via Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

Technorati Tags: brain, future

Medical tourism for the uninsured

A couple months ago, we noted that medical tourism was going blue collar. Now, Wired News reports that uninsured Americans are starting to look abroad for health care:

As startling numbers of Americans go without health insurance, more of them see their only hope in fleeing to far-flung nations like India for life-saving medial treatments.

The dearth of affordable health insurance has engendered a new breed of what the New England Journal of Medicine classifies as "medical refugees" -- patients traveling abroad for heart surgery and other crucial procedures -- that has grown sharply in the past two years....

The phenomenon of "medical tourists" -- people who casually travel to foreign lands for face lifts or breast implants -- has been well documented. But the new exodus of patients are looking for more essential care. Indian hospitals welcome these sick travelers with open arms, often lavishing them with more attention than they could expect in their home country.

Indeed, the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that they not be called "emdical tourists," but "medical refugees:"

The mainstream media have begun to highlight the plight of some new refugees: seriously ill Americans who receive treatment at advanced private hospitals in low-income countries. These patients are not "medical tourists" seeking low-cost aesthetic enhancement. They are middle-income Americans evading impoverishment by expensive, medically necessary operations, as health care services are increasingly included in international economic trade....

To ensure both significant savings net of travel expenses and patients' safety, such offshore care must be limited to nonurgent, short-duration treatments costing more than $15,000 to $20,000 in the United States for conditions that aren't exacerbated by air travel; these include major cardiac and orthopedic procedures. We estimate that treatments meeting these criteria currently account for less than 2% of U.S. spending on noncosmetic health care for worker households (excluding care for U.S. residents who live along the Mexican border).

Technorati Tags: India, medical tourism

Synthetic Gecko

The gecko must be one of the most-studied animals in the world today, thanks to its ability to climb virtually any surface. A number of engineers are working on making synthetic gecko tape, which would adhere strongly to a surface, without leaving adhesive residue. British company BAE Systems recently announced that it had created Synthetic Gecko, a reusable polymer "covered in millions of tiny mushroom-like hairs."

Future applications could include an adhesive to repair aircraft, skin grafts or even a Spiderman-style suit.

"It would mean that your local window cleaner could dispense with his ladders and climb up the side of your house," says Dr Sajad Haq, a principal research scientist at the company's Advanced Technology Centre in Filton, Bristol....

It is manufactured by a modified version of a technique known as photo-lithography, commonly used to make silicon chips.

The technique uses light to etch three-dimensional patterns into a material.

"The processes we use are modifications of standard electronic fabrication processes," says Dr Haq. "They're cheap, well known, well understood and can be scaled up to very large areas cheaply."

Technorati Tags: biomimicry

Cities That Live?

We had a fascinating presentation from Drew Endy of MIT's Biological Engineering Division, which was "founded in 1998 as a new MIT departmental academic unit, with the mission of defining and establishing a new discipline fusing molecular life sciences with engineering."

Drew talked about current trends in biotechnology research that more or less led us to believe that there is a fair amount of standardization beginning to happen in the biotech world - the biological equivalent of simple building-block components like screws is starting to happen.

My head has been spinning since then. My research has focused on the impacts of information and communications technology on cities. Yet for about 2-3 years, I keep having these moments where some news bit on advances in life sciences make me think that it's time to start thinking about how biological engineering is going to reshape what increasingly looks like its going to be a world of cities by the end of the 21st century.

I see three main threads worth thinking about:

• New materials - it will start as "dead" substitutes for things we use now like steel, concrete, etc. We'll figure out how to mass produce spider silk and it will become a ubiquitous construction material. But eventually we'll start bioenginnering "materials" that are actually living organisms. Why build a building skeleton out of steel when you can engineer a living tree to grow itself into a self-repairing, self-cooling sustainable structure (that also conveniently removes a lot of carbon from the atmosphere).
  
• Bio-inspired structures and components - the most famous example of biomimicry in architecture is the Eastgate Building in Zimbabwe which cools itself in a process similar to that of a termite mound, but bio-inspired designs for structures and components that heat, cool, house, produce, or purify will become widespread as we gain much better understanding of small-scale biological processes.
  
• Bio-inspired systems and dynamics - as our understanding of emergence improves, we'll increasingly seek to employ these phenomena in larger systems, and to guide the life cycle of the built environment. We'll more explicitly incorporate biological concepts as we think about how individual buildings, rooms, and infrastructure components function within the greater whole of a street, neighborhood, or city.
  

I think this is an interesting strand of thought, if only because it potentially presents some very different possible alternatives to the "grey goo" scenarios where nanobots eat everything in a frenzy of self-replication. Maybe a world of cities built on a more bio-centric set of technologies offers a more resilient, sustainable path around these dead ends.

Biotech in the Closet

A great piece on NPR this morning about cloned stem cell research in the US, my favorite part was where they talked about the tiny little lab - basically a closet in a sub-sub-basement - where UC-San Francisco's stem cell cloning research effort is housed. Of course, that's because without federal funding, they don't have much money for more. However, they are making significant progress, which shows (as IFTF is increasingly coming to believe) that a desktop biotech revolution is in the making. For instance, what's stopping anybody from picking up a DNA sequencer on EBay?

Here's a link to the NPR story.

Biotech in Silicon Valley-- losing the edge?

If the loss of Jenkins and Copeland weren't enough bad news for the biomedical sciences in the region, last week the Mercury News also reported that the region presents obstacles to rapidly-maturing biotech firms:

As Bay Area biotech companies shift from primarily doing research to making products, many of them may seek inexpensive manufacturing locations outside of California, an industry group warned Monday.

Northern California biotechnology and medical-device firms have about 240 products on the market and more than 200 others under development, according to a report made public by BayBio, which represents such companies.

But executives with the group said the high cost of doing business here -- coupled with onerous government regulations -- could push many local firms to manufacture those products in other states or countries where it's cheaper to operate.

So far this isn't a problem, but BayBio warns that it could become one.

Technorati Tags: biology, Silicon Valley

Stanford loses to Berkeley, and Singapore

For the fourth year in a row, Stanford lost to Cal in the Big Game. (Go Cal!)

But the weekend's loss on the gridiron, painful though it may have been to Stanford fans, may isn't the big news at the University. Two of the nation's best stem cell researchers, Neal Copeland and Nancy Jenkins, have turned down an offer to join Stanford's Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine, in favor of going to Singapore's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology.

According to Lisa Krieger's article in the San Jose Mercury News,

Jenkins and Copeland have been heavily recruited by Stanford's Irving Weissman... [whose] lab has identified a small population of cells, called cancer stem cells, that self-renew to replenish the growing cancer. He hopes to expand his lab, so that Stanford can be a leader in the field of cancer genetics.

The married couple recently toured Stanford labs, underwent interviews and visited Palo Alto, Weissman said. Their lab and staff would have cost $1.4 million a year for about 10 years.

But Copeland and Jenkins announced that they are leaving the National Cancer Institute for Singapore's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, attracted by the nation's burgeoning medical research, which faces fewer restrictions than U.S. programs... [They were also] worried by delays in the allocation of $3 billion in taxpayer funds allocated for stem-cell research by Proposition 71....

"It is a loss for Stanford and a loss for America," Weissman said. "Without a doubt, they are the best people I know to find out which genes are altered to cause cancer."

"When they do their work, it will be for Singapore," he said. "They'll conduct their clinical trials in Singapore. The first place their work will be patented and used will be Singapore."...

Weissman fears that as other nations spring ahead in stem-cell research, the United States -- and California, specifically -- will lose other leaders in the field.

Stanford-educated geneticist Edison Liu, also formerly of the National Cancer Institute, moved to Singapore to build an international research institute focused on integrating genomic sciences with cell and medical biology.

Meanwhile, Weissman says he has other leading researchers he is trying to bring to Stanford.

"We're sitting on the fence," he said. "I have two other recruits, all sitting back and waiting."

The IMCB, not surprisingly, is crowing:

Dr Copeland currently directs and Dr Jenkins co-heads the NCI’s Mouse Cancer Genetics programme. The husband-and-wife team are amongst the world’s most highly cited scientists and are considered superstars in their field.

Professor Sir David Lane, Executive Director of IMCB said, “I am delighted to welcome Neal and Nancy to IMCB. They are outstanding scientists with a wonderful knowledge of mouse genetics. They will place IMCB and Singapore at the forefront of animal models of human disease and will help enormously with our biomedical sciences development. They are inspiring mentors for our local talent.”

Mr Philip Yeo, Chairman of the Agency for Science, Technology & Research (A*STAR), said, “With Neal and Nancy coming onboard, things can only get more exciting at Biopolis, which already has a great community of cancer researchers – David Lane, Axel Ullrich, Yoshiaki Ito and Edison Liu to name a few. I heartily welcome them both to the A*STAR family.”

In a way, this isn't terribly surprising: Singapore has been moving aggressively to build its expertise in stem cell, and cutting-edge bioscience more generally. Lane was recruited in 2004 to head IMCB, and a number of other scientists from the U.S. and Europe are there at least part-time.

Interestingly, Lane's wife, Birgitte Lane, is an authority on skin cells; I don't know if IMCB makes a point of going after couples, but if they do, it's a very shrewd move. Academic institutions in the U.S. face a constant problem of dealing with spousal hires, and I don't think any university has really figured out how to do it in a consistent way that's consistently satisfactory: too often, one spouse ends up on the short end of the stick, and it's very clear to everyone which of the two the university really wanted. If the Singaporeans have identified this as a weak point to exploit, they're playing a smart game.

Technorati Tags: biology, brain circulation, Silicon Valley, stem cells

Ian Pearson on... thinks about... talks about... oh, just follow the link

BT futurologist Ian Pearson has an admirable instinct for the spectacular, easy-to-understand claim about the future-- the sort of image or trend that captures an entire age. My instinct is to be the E. P. Thompson of the future, to look for moral economies and the track how perceptions of time and work change with new technologies; Pearson, in contrast, goes right for the... um, jugular. From Ananova:

Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman's breast implants.

One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the person's whole music collection.

BT futurology, who have developed the idea, say it could be available within 15 years.

BT Laboratories' analyst Ian Pearson said flexible plastic electronics would sit inside the breast. A signal would be relayed to headphones, while the device would be controlled by Bluetooth using a panel on the wrist.

According to The Sun he said: "It is now very hard for me to think of breast implants as just decorative. If a woman has something implanted permanently, it might as well do something useful."

I suppose there's a witty observation to be made about women being better at multitasking, or the Mozart Effect. But I'll just go reread The Making of the English Working Class....

[via Yme Bosma]

Technorati Tags: biology, cyborg, future, music

Chopsticks and clones

David Plotz explains why South Korea leads the world in stem cell research:

The Chopstick Theory of Scientific Supremacy goes like this: Koreans eat with narrow, metal chopsticks. Nabbing grains of rice with slippery, steel sticks requires a surgeon's dexterity. That's why Koreans have mastered extraordinarily precise "micromanipulation" of eggs and embryos required for stem-cell and cloning research. Westerners with their clunky forks—and even other Asians with their thick, grippy wooden chopsticks—can't hope to compete with the dexterous Koreans.

The Chopstick Theory is how Hwang Woo-suk, the world's greatest cloner, accounts for his nation's stem-cell success. The theory has undeniable appeal: It's exotic, it's funny, and it's even partly true. But it only begins to explain a peculiar anomaly of global science: how South Korea, a nation of only 48 million people and no history of biotech accomplishment, has emerged as the world capital of stem-cell and cloning research.

I talked to Plotz a few weeks ago, when he was doing background research for the story; it's good to see the piece out now. It's pretty good.

Technorati Tags: Korea, science

Kurzweil and Joy:

Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, writing in today's New York Times, call the Department of Health and Human Services' recent decision to publish the 1918 influenza virus genotype "extremely foolish," and go on to argue for "international agreements by scientific organizations to limit such publications and an international dialogue on the best approach to preventing recipes for weapons of mass destruction from falling into the wrong hands." They argue:

The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

First, it would be easier to create and release this highly destructive virus from the genetic data than it would be to build and detonate an atomic bomb given only its design, as you don't need rare raw materials like plutonium or enriched uranium.... Second, release of the virus would be far worse than an atomic bomb. Analyses have shown that the detonation of an atomic bomb in an American city could kill as many as one million people. Release of a highly communicable and deadly biological virus could kill tens of millions, with some estimates in the hundreds of millions.

Technorati Tags: catastrophe, health, science

Self-repairing spacecraft

From New Scientist, another interesting example of biomimicry:

A spacecraft skin is being developed that assesses the severity of any damage it suffers from space debris and other impacts. The project, which is inspired by the behaviour of ants, is seen as the first step towards a self-repairing craft.

The team at CSIRO, Australia's national research organisation, is working with NASA on the project and has so far created a model skin made up of 192 separate cells. Behind each cell is an impact sensor and a processor equipped with algorithms that allow it to communicate only with its immediate neighbours. Just as ants secrete pheromones to help guide other ants to food, the CSIRO algorithms leave digital messages in cells around the system, indicating for instance the position of the boundary around a damaged region. The cell's processor can use this information to route data around the affected area.

Technorati Tags: biomimicry, space

Michael Chorost on Cochlear Implants and Transhumanism

On August 31st, Michael Chorost, author of Rebuilt : How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, spoke at the Institute. Below are my notes from the talk (which haven't been vetted by the author, so all caveats apply--- quotes are approximate, and you should assume that the overall shape of these notes reflects my attention and interpretation, not what Mike actually said or meant).

(from the IFTF flickr photoset)

Technorati Tags: communication, cyborg, digital/physical, IFTF, paloalto, Silicon Valley, work

First sex and rock 'n' roll. Next up: drugs

We've seen the rise of DIY media in music (both on the consumption side, through the old Napster and BitTorrent, and more interestingly, on the production side, through cheap tools like GarageBand), and erotica and pornography (or so I've heard). Now, Peter Schwartz says in Foreign Policy, drugs are next:

The war on drugs will soon be over. It won’t have been won or lost, and we certainly won’t have wiped out illicit drug use. People will still pursue their personal pleasures and uncontrollable addictions. No, the war on drugs will end because drugs as we know them today will be gone.

The model drug of the future is already here in the form of crystal methamphetamine, a drug that is sweeping the United States and making inroads abroad. It’s cheap and easy to make—little more than Sudafed doctored up with plant fertilizer....

Thirty-five years from now, the illicit professionals who remain in the business will be custom drug designers catering to the wealthy. Their concoctions will be fine-tuned to one’s own body and neural chemistry. In time, the most destructive side effects will be designed out, perhaps even addiction itself. These custom drug dealers will design the perfect chemical experience for those who can afford it. The combination of cocaine with skiing, sex, or other intense physical activities is common today; likewise for pot and making music. In the future, there will be custom drugs for meals, golf, gardening, and more. Like crystal meth today, some drugs will reach the point of home manufacturing. And they will all be designed to make their use invisible to others—no red eyes, nervous tics, or lethargy.

What'll it mean to have a pharmacological DIY world, the drug equivalent of custom fab? The decline of international narcotraffic (to the U.S. and Europe, anyway), for one thing, and less drug dealing-related violence. At home,

The boundary between legal performance enhancement (Viagra) and the illegal drugs of pleasure and creativity will blur. The political and social pressure against drug use will remain, but it will increasingly resemble the campaigns against performance-enhancing drugs for athletes....

Just as the legal system is struggling with new realities of intellectual property in a digital age, it will struggle to control innovation in the chemistry of pleasure.

Technorati Tags: future, manufacturing

It's out!

My review of Michael Chorost's Rebuilt : How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human is available on the L.A. Times Web site. I think it's also the lead review, but I haven't seen hard copy yet; I've got a couple copies reserved at my local bookstore.

Unlike my review of Ramez Naam's excellent More Than Human : Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, I actually found this one myself.

I'm finding the transhumanist argument-- or at least the more humanist incarnation represented by Naam and Chorost, and a few others-- more and more compelling. Or to put it another way, they're trying to deal with questions that we're all going to be struggling with in the future.

Technorati Tags: books, cyborg, Rebuilt

Better brains

Want an upgrade? New Scientist lists "11 steps to a better brain."

[via Dan Pink]

Korean scientists interviewed on cloning

Today's New York Times has an interview with Drs. Woo Suk Hwang and Shin Yong Moon, the Korean scientists who recently announced that they had cloned and extracted a stem cell line from a human embryo. One interesting moment in the questioning dealt with government regulation of human cloning and stem cell research, and touched on issues of both ethics and national scientific competitiveness:

Q. Leon R. Kass, the bioethics adviser to President Bush, said that he would like to see your type of research banned in the United States. What is your reaction?

WOO SUK HWANG: Our goal has never been to create cloned human babies, but to find the causes of incurable diseases and to offer a new window for cures.

SHIN YONG MOON: Professor Hwang and I have called for a ban on reproductive cloning. We don't want people using our techniques to make human beings. We urge every nation to prepare a law as soon as possible to prevent human cloning. As a scientist, I think reproductive cloning should be banned.

Q. What do you think would happen to American science if all cloning were banned?

MOON: If all human cloning will be prohibited here, that would be a problem for American science. Stem cell research [which cloning facilitates] is very important for understanding the basic science of human development. And it is also very important for new drug evaluations. So biotechnology development — not all of it, but some — would be delayed and hindered in the United States.

Q. Do you have problems with your own government over your work?

HWANG: I can answer your question like this: If Korea were to prohibit therapeutic cloning research, we would have to go to other countries where it is permitted — Singapore, mainland China, maybe Great Britain. But my hope is that the Korean government will give us the license to do this kind of research. If they don't, we will move.

Nicholas Wade on cloning in Korea and the U.S.

Science writer Nicholas Wade argues in Sunday's New York Times that

The production of the first human cloned embryo in Seoul last week marked a fine achievement for South Korean scientists. But it underlines the price the United States may pay for its unresolved debate over human embryonic stem cells: if American researchers lose their technical lead, Washington will also forfeit the chance to set the ethical rules of the game.

Wade's op-ed piece echoes other writers' concerns about America's position as a leader of the world scientific community. As Stanford University Irving Weissman put it, the Korean work "says we are going to watch it happen."

[via gyre.org]

GM on the rise

Two pieces in the last 24 hours point to the increase in GM experiments globally. The first piece was on the possible new large planting sites in the U.K. -- not that important a read unless you are really following this stuff.

This was followed by a Washington Post piece this morning on the global trend (I love trend articles), More Acres Devoted to Biotech Crops by Justin Gillis.

"The global acreage devoted to genetically altered crops jumped 15 percent last year, the seventh straight year of double-digit growth..."

It continues to note that U.S. plantings have slowed a bit, while:

The biggest change is in developing countries, where increasing numbers of small farmers are growing biotech crops, notably cotton. From 2002 to 2003, a million more farmers adopted the crops worldwide, raising the total number of farmers growing them to 7 million. Of those, about 6 million are cotton farmers in China, putting that country of small, peasant farmers in the forefront of technological change in agriculture.

The article goes on to rehash the current state of the GM controversy, EU intransigence, US belligerence, and the dreaded commercial interests. But it makes the point a few times that:

Farmers don't seem to be waiting for the debate to settle. Biotech seeds cost them more than regular seeds, sometimes twice as much, but the farmers appear to be deciding that the benefits -- which can include higher yields or lower costs for labor and chemicals, depending on a given year's growing conditions -- are worth the expense.

The article ends by quoting environmental groups that they hope to destroy these innovations through the use of scare tactics.

Hey, did anyone see the chimera article at New Scientist? Seems somehow related, doesn't it?

Pig-human chimeras contain cell surprise:

The animals develop totally fused cells, with potentially serious implications for xenotransplantation and even the origin of HIV.