Alexey Guzey on progress in the life sciences

I already linked to this piece, but wanted to recommend it again.  I don’t agree with all of the points, but it has many excellent arguments, here is one excerpt from the opening section:

I think that the perception of stagnation in science – and in biology specifically – is basically fake news, driven by technological hedonic treadmill and nostalgia. We rapidly adapt to technological advances – however big they are – and we always idealize the past – however terrible it was.

I mean – we can just go to Wikipedia’s 2018 in science (a) and see how much progress we made last year:

  • first bionic hand with a sense of touch that can be worn outside a laboratory
  • development of a new 3D bioprinting technique, which allows the more accurate printing of soft tissue organs, such as lungs
  • a method through which the human innate immune system may possibly be trained to more efficiently respond to diseases and infections
  • a new form of biomaterial based delivery system for therapeutic drugs, which only release their cargo under certain physiological conditions, thereby potentially reducing drug side-effects in patients
  • an announcement of human clinical trials, that will encompass the use of CRISPR technology to modify the T cells of patients with multiple myeloma, sarcoma and melanoma cancers, to allow the cells to more effectively combat the cancers, the first of their kind trials in the US
  • a blood test (or liquid biopsy) that can detect eight common cancer tumors early. The new test, based on cancer-related DNA and proteins found in the blood, produced 70% positive results in the tumor-types studied in 1005 patients
  • a method of turning skin cells into stem cells, with the use of CRISPR
  • the creation of two monkey clones for the first time
  • a paper which presents possible evidence that naked mole-rats do not face increased mortality risk due to aging

Doesn’t seem like much? Here’s the kicker: this is not 2018. This is January 2018.

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