Plug in to my prognostications and pontifications. I have been in the field of healthcare information technology for quite sometime so the focus of these pages regarding technology and the future decidedly leans in that direction.

The convergence of technologies is advancing and changing so rapidly that creations brought to life from nanotechnology are causing fundamental changes in thinking. The idea of building something from nothing may seem like alchemy, but current technology has taken us to places we have never thought imaginable. New products can be built in the lab rather than growing, destroying, and creating from the rubble. Modern day alchemists can now actually build and enhance many parts of the human body without human tissue to begin with. How long will it be before we can put them together and create a whole? Mary Shelley would be amazed at how far we have progressed.

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a new silicon chip that could be embedded directly into the eye and connected to the nerves that carry signals to the brain's visual cortex. The chip aims to help people suffering from retinitis pigmentosa, which is the gradual death of one's retinal cells, those really useful bits of organic matter that convert light into nerve impulses for the brain to process. Previous attempts at solving this biological conundrum have often gone the route of using a video camera usually connected to a tiny computer to process the signal, which is then attached to the optic nerve. This chip could be directly implanted into the eye, with a direct connection to the optic nerve, removing the need for an external camera. It mimics the way a healthy retina adjusts to light intensity, contrast, and even movement.

Touch Bionics announced its i-LIMB Hand and ProDigits partial hand prostheses are available and have been successfully fitted in the United States and Europe. The i-LIMB Hand looks and acts like a real human hand and is the world's first widely available prosthetic device with five individually powered digits. It says the i-LIMB Hand offers an intuitive control system that uses a traditional myoelectric signal input to open and close the hand's life-like fingers. Myoelectric controls utilize the electrical signal generated by muscles in the remaining portion of a patient's limb. This signal is picked up by electrodes that sit on the surface of the skin.

An engineered liquid material, developed by a Northwestern University professor, that can be injected into damaged spinal cords could help prevent scars and encourage damaged nerve fibers to grow. It contains molecules that self-assemble into nanofibers, which act as a scaffold on which nerve fibers grow
and has restored function to the hind legs of paralyzed mice.

The new work is the first test for the material to heal spinal cord injuries in animals. The researchers stimulated a spinal cord injury in mice and injected the material 24 hours later. They found that the material reduced the size of scars and stimulated the growth of the nerve fibers through the scars. It promoted the growth of both types of nerve fibers that make up the spinal cord: motor fibers that carry signals from the brain to the limbs, and sensory fibers that carry sense signals to the brain. In addition, the material encouraged the nerve stem cells to mature into cells that create myelin-an insulating layer around nerve fibers that helps them to conduct signals more effectively.

More than 40,000 Parkinson's disease patients already have brain implants, like pacemakers inserted in their brains. Tiny electrical signals zap overactive nerve cells and calm tremors. Now scientists have found a way to use brain pacemakers to act as antidepressants by using deep brain stimulation or DBS. So far results are encouraging for both depression and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.
Plug in - If they can disable bad feelings, maybe soon they will be able to stimulate good feelings.

J. Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher (and one of my heroes), has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and announced the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth. This heralds a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species. The team of scientists has already successfully transplanted the genome of one type of bacterium into the cell of another, effectively changing the cell's species.
In January, 2008, a team of researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute  has created the largest man-made DNA structure by synthesizing and assembling the 582,970 base pair genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0. This work, published online in the journal Science is the second of three key steps toward the team's goal of creating a fully synthetic organism. In the next step, which is ongoing at the institute, the team will attempt to create a living bacterial cell based entirely on the synthetically made genome. 

The preceding are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research. The potential power of chimeras as research tools became clear about a decade ago in a series of dramatic experiments by Evan Balaban, now at McGill University in Montreal. Balaban took small sections of brain from developing quails and transplanted them into the developing brains of chickens.
Seems that scientists feel, the more humanlike the animal, the better research model it makes for testing drugs or possibly growing "spare parts," such as livers, to transplant into humans.
There are currently few U.S. federal laws that address these issues. Canada passed the Assisted Human Reproduction Act in 2004, which bans chimeras. Specifically, it prohibits transferring a nonhuman cell into a human embryo and putting human cells into a nonhuman embryo.

Let's go back and look at the timeline of progress and how we have come to this stage. The printing press was invented five hundred years ago. Typewriters have been around since the 1800s. Consider that 37.5% of the US population was involved in agriculture in 1900 and today less than half of one percent are in that business. We still have all the food we need, as well as supply other parts of the world.
The computer has been around since the late 1940s. The PC was born in the 1980s (E-mail actually preceded PCs by a few years). Cell phones came into vogue in the 1990s. Forty years ago the most complex computer chip had 64 transistors and today the new new chips contain 40 million. In 1994 there were 38 million internet users and in 2004 there were 800 million internet users.

In the early 1970s the industry was looking forward to a computer that could perform a million calculations a second.  IBM hit 70 teraflops in 2005.
In 2007, NEC said that its latest supercomputer, called SX-9, is capable of calculating 839 teraflops. That's 839 trillion floating point operations per second.
 
November 17, 2008. IBM's Roadrunner inched out Cray Inc.'s newly beefed-up XT5 Jaguar to retain the top spot on the biannual Top500 list of supercomputers.

Roadrunner, which is installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, had its own upgrade in the past few months, enabling it to hit 1.105 petaflops, or more than a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second.

Jaguar, the second of only two computers to break the petaflop barrier, grabbed second place on the list, with a top performance of 1.059 petaflops running the Linpack benchmark application.

SGI and Intel Corp. are teaming up to build a supercomputer for NASA that they expect will pass the PetaFLOPS barrier next year and hit 10 PFLOPS by 2012. Techs from SGI had it fully assembled in July 2008. So far, all is on track. It came in third after the two preceding systems in the November, 2008 Top500 list.
February 2009, the US government has contracted with IBM to build a 20 PFLOP machine (named Sequoia) to be completed by 2012. This again, leapfrogs the other machines. (A petaflop 1,125,899,906,842,624 calculations per second - a thousand trillion.)

The human brain is estimated to operate at the 10 petaflops speed. Can this new Sequoia system match our imagination?
Plug in - I think  that within the next 10 years it will happen. Of course, then we will have to teach it to play nice with others.

Speaking of speed, the Internet2 just boosted its throughput to 100Gps. Internet2 is currently used by academic and healthcare institutions and likely will provide the next iteration of the internet for the rest of us. It has been around since 1996 and is currently deployed nationwide. Hospitals have been slower than universities to jump on the Internet2 bandwagan because of cost, but as PACS systems and electronic records come to the fore it won't be long before they will be forced to move forward. In driving, speed kills, in technology speed thrills.

To put things in an understandable perspective, it took two centuries to fill the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. with more than 29 million books and periodicals, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 57 million manuscripts. In 2004 it took less than 15 minutes for the world to churn out an equivalent amount of new digital information. No recent news, but I suspect that it is now accomplished every two minutes. That's a total of five exabytes (EB = 1 quintillion bytes or 1000 to the sixth power) annually, which is an amount equal to all the words ever spoken by humans. It is not hard to understand that life is changing at an exponential rate. NASA already is storing enough data to fill the library of Congress 6oo times. Where is it leading? Ubiquitous and pervasive computing, embeded technology, knowledge on demand and more are already here. Ipods, nanos, wearable monitors, and pacemakers are just the beginning. Mork was warning us and should have been saying nano nano.
Plug in - These are the good old days, but the best is yet to come.

We will need all of that speed and storage (and more) to process the  mountains of data that we are now digitally collecting. During 2003, the National Digital Mammography Archive (now called the National Digital Medical Archive), University of Pennsylvania, announced that it would need to house 28 petabytes of data per year from 2000 hospitals, just for digital mammography images. Think of the challenge to collect, manage, store, retrieve, index, and mine that much data and present meaningful results to physicians. The practice of medicine can never be the same.

If you think we have problems now, check out the future of transhumanism. Some believe that technologically advanced humans will pose the greatest threat to humanity. There are some folks planning for changes that we have yet to imagine.

A project that is key to advancing our knowledge of human disease was announced November, 2004 and is expanded and still going strong as of 2009. It combines the resources of millions of unused personal computer resources with research that identifies the proteins that make up the Human Proteome. Using this knowledge, scientists are building the understanding needed for novel and effective treatments for illnesses such as AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, malaria, and cancer.
The World Community Grid project was developed by the NIH, World Health Organization, United Nations and others. It's goal is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. It is still growing and has produced some amazing results so far.
The project requires hundreds of thousands of volunteers to contribute idle capacity of their computers. Participating researchers using this data must agree to make their research and software available to the public.
Grid technology is simple and safe to use. To start, you download and install a small program or "agent" onto your computer. When idle, your computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid's server. It will then perform computations on this data, send the results back to the server, and ask the server for a new piece of work. Each computation that your computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research.
Anyone who wants to join the grid and offer unused computer time can do so by downloading software from the World Community Grid Web site. The grid is akin to the SETI project and only uses your computer when it is on but not in use. For instance, when you are reading e-mail, it uses the additional resources to process data, but stops when you are typing.
» Plug in - your unused computer time is valuable

The pages behind the NBIC tab show applications in the medical and technology fields that are here today, although use in everyday practice for some may take a while. These pages not intended to be the apotheosis of all things nano, just tidbits that I have found interesting and enlightening. Read about children with three parents on the amazing stuff page.
»  Plug in - sometimes smaller is better.

The project management pages might appear a bit mundane after all of the previous, but humans require order in their life and moving new technology from the lab to practical use still requires discipline. Although project failures in the past have outnumbered successes, we have learned from our mistakes. Successes have begun to outnumber failures and this has happened because we have learned from the past. Read the tenets that I have gleaned from my experience. 
»  Plug in - project success is possible.

If you have ideas for content or reactions to my ponderings, you can reach me through e-mail - tom (at) shubnell.com  

Also, If you see any information on these pages that you would like to share with others, please give appropriate credit to the author, Thomas F. Shubnell, Ph.D.   

                                     Thanks for stopping by

                                   Last updated June 29, 2009