Fascinating post by Eli Dourado, giving his view about his expectations for scientific progress during the next 10 years.
Vaccines, anti-aging, energy generation, electrification, supersonic flights, space exploration, chip technology, crypto currencies and manufacturing. You name it, he's got it covered.
Example:
We are coming off a huge win: two new mRNA COVID vaccines, conceived and brought to market in less than a year. The ability to encode and deploy arbitrary mRNA in our bodies sure seems like a game changer—it allows us to essentially program our cells to make whatever proteins we want. In the case of the COVID vaccines, the vaccine payload instructs our cells to make the coronavirus spike protein, which our immune system then learns to attack. Bert Hubert has a fascinating write-up of the “code” in the vaccine.
Bringing a brand new vaccine to market in less than a year—using a never-before-applied-in-humans-at-scale technology no less—is a world record, but it could have been even faster. As David Wallace-Wells emphasizes, Moderna’s vaccine was designed by January 13. We had it the whole time. Some delay was necessary to determine effective dosing. Some further regulatory delay may have been warranted to ensure the vaccine was safe and to ascertain its efficacy. But as Wallace-Wells indicates, the regulatory outcome was never really in doubt. “None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome,” he writes. “All said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along.”
What should we make of the fact that all of the scientists knew all along that Moderna’s vaccine would work? The question in my mind is: what other mRNA treatments do we have the whole time? What if I told you Moderna has an HIV vaccine candidate? HIV lacks SARS-CoV-2’s telltale spike protein and thus may prove a more challenging foe—but don’t you wonder, if we treated the problem with real urgency, whether new mRNA technology could wipe out the AIDS epidemic this decade? I do.
And mRNA technology can be deployed against more than just viruses. Both Moderna and BioNTech have personalized vaccine candidates targeting cancer. Although called a “cancer vaccine,” the treatment is only administered once the subject has cancer—it isn’t preventative. The companies use an algorithm to analyze the genetic sequences of the tumor and the patient’s healthy cells and predict which molecules could be used to generate a strong immune response against the cancer. “I was actually witnessing the cancer cells shrinking before my eyes,” said Brad Kremer, a melanoma patient who received the BioNTech treatment. So let’s milk mRNA technology for all it’s worth this decade. It can save us from more than just a pandemic.
Full blog text here: Notes on technology in the 2020s
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Originally Posted by magirus
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