It's such a tease seeing headlines like these as someone with a bone disease. I've started following grants for research on my illness 15 years ago, and every few years they reapply having discovered a tiny part of the process necessary to understand the disease and develop a therapy.
As a scientist I know things take time and hard, dedicated, work but as a patient it's soul-draining to see your life pass you by while waiting for these discoveries to materialize into cures or drugs.
I would recommend keeping an eye on Emcell - they have been doing research using donated fetal tissue (there are an estimated 50mm+ abortions per year) for 30 years, and they've recently been able to ramp up their research efforts due to demand and exposure increasing for their existing treatments.
A lot of people accept the practice of medicine in just the way that they experience it, rather than as it could be.
It's just accepted that there are limits to what medicine can do, and often times those limitations are devastating. This outlook makes sense for most people, because what else would they do?
However, for every high-profile disease process that doesn't have a known and rigorously understood cause, medicine as a field of study has a major gap in it.
These aren't just gaps. These are major gaps. They're high-profile. They cause endless suffering for families across the world, they kill people, they make beloved grandparents forget everything about themselves and their families as they slowly die.
If we haven't been able to pinpoint the root causes of these things that are getting huge amounts of attention, imagine what else we're missing.
And the fundamental truth that we are too scared to accept: death is just another disease. Death is just another way to say we did not have the technology or ability to save a life. That the limits of modern medicine were, unfortunately, reached.
We accept death as a “reality” today, because we have no choice. But tomorrow, humans will look back on our age with horror - that self-aware beings were doomed to an eternal abyss, barely having a chance to live to begin with!
In the far future, I imagine that the unintentional loss of even a single self-aware sentience would be both newsworthy and devastating. I envy the children of tomorrow that will have a choice in the matter of their mortality, much as I would envy the luxuries of people of today were I to be born centuries ago.
I envy their consciousnesses, distributed amongst computers scattered throughout space, operating on timescales that make our own lives look like a blink of an eye, able to live out whatever reality they desire for however long they wish to live, barring the heat death itself.
Death is not a disease. It is part of life. What people should be scared of is not dying, which is just an inevitability - it is the failure to live while they are alive here on the most beautiful planet in the universe.
The future you envy of "consciousness distributed amongst computers scattered throughout space" is not living in the way that we have available to us now here on earth.
Look up at the sky. Feel the sun's rays. Visit a mountain and notice the wildlife in the treetops. Just watch those wildlife for a while, until their thoughts become yours.
Talk to somebody you've never met before. Just smile and say, how about this weather! What they say will be worth more to you than any number of MIPS from a grid in space.
Death as we know it is only a part of life because we have no other choice.
I guarantee you that if tomorrow people could press a button and stave off death and aging for decades at a time, we would suddenly end the narrative that “death is part of life.”
If tomorrow doctors could rejuvenate someone on their deathbed to relative youth with the press of a button, it would be done in the vast majority of cases.
We are forced to accept death as “part of life” because of our current technological reality, just as we were forced to accept many diseases and a shorter lifespan in the past.
But I think it’s clear as day, that if people had control over their mortality and youth, we would not look at death as an inevitability, a “part of life”, but rather a choice, perhaps even a failure on our part.
Just because everyone wants immortality for themselves doesn't mean that it's a good thing for humanity. Political and social change is almost entirely achieved by old people retiring and eventually dying, and younger people with different worldviews taking over for them. Removing this process dooms a society to stagnation.
Similarly our problems with wealth inequality will get much worse if rich people never die and just keep accumulating wealth forever.
And what about population? We can't just keep adding children to a planet if people don't die in meaningful numbers. There are only so many resources to go around.
And then there's the problem of indoctrination of knowledge, different paths of indoctrination with more or less regulatory and narrative capture, direction guiding on what gets researched and what gets suppressed by the different industrial complexes - stagnancy and bureaucracies.
"King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery"
and it was really amazing.
Did you know the first open-heart surgeries were performed by stitching two people's circulatory systems together, to keep the person getting the operation from dying?
Given that I think "getting things done" in the medical field will always be a huge challenge that regular people on the outside may never understand.
We are still in the stone age with regards medicine, biology, and microbiology. The tools we have might seem incredible to some, but they're extremely crude by future standards. Sure you could say this about any industry but it's especially true about medicine.
I was just thinking about this. They just found a new salivary gland a few months ago. And that was in a relatively accessible location... would not be surprised if there are similar things waiting to be discovered in the brain.
That's definitely the wrong place for excitement: it's a vanity project for someone who imagines that money can burn past necessary research.
Look at real biological research programs if you want to be excited. Even in computery tech, the recent advance in AI protein folding solvers is much more exciting than anything likely to come out of Neuralink.
What blows my mind is that we have something like CRISPR and people using it with certainty and cavelier "throw caution to the wind" attitude, while undiscovered cells are still a thing.
I feel similarly about SSRI/MAOI drugs. Doctors prescribe these as if humans understood brain chemistry. I’m sure we understand some things, but we have such an incomplete picture.
It wasn’t too long ago doctors thought the shape of your head could predict a propensity for criminality!
Doctors prescribe these drugs because their benefits are proven by research. Depression in particular has a massive impact on society and it is understood that the benefits of the treatments outweigh the risks.
Don't think I've ever seen anyone prescribing MAOIs. There are better options with less side effects.
Anyone who's maintained even a five-year-old deliberately and well-designed software system knows how unpredictable it can be to mess with random components.
Here, we're talking about a system with 3.5 billion years of stochastic randomness.
Hmmm I wonder how many more types of cells like this there are. Is there any reason to think that body wouldn't use a very small amount each of an enormous amount of specialist cells.
The thing about biology is that even the "known unknowns" form a huge list. There are over 200 different known types of cells, but there are probably lots more waiting to be discovered. Lots of genes in the body have unknown or hand-waving functions. If you look at a cell biology book, there are lots of questions marks in the diagrams.
It seems to me that scientists should be putting a lot more effort into answering these questions. I consider these questions much more important than the questions that particle physics is expensively investigating for instance. It's as if an advanced alien nanotechnology machine appeared and people didn't put all their effort into understanding it.
> This, together with the evidence of the new re-fusion processes observed by intravital imaging, convinced us that we had discovered a new cell type, which we called osteomorphs, after the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
This goes with the gene named after Sonic the Hedgehog I guess. Supposedly this kind of name makes it difficult for doctors when they have to tell people they have cancer caused by a sonic hedgehog mutation.
A sonic hedgehog mutation doesn't cause cancer, it causes central midline defects (which in fruit flies turns the fruit fly larvae into spiky balls, hence the name.)
Wait, that gene was literally named after Sonic the Hedgehog? Always thought it was some kind of happy coincidence. Not very scientific but extremely cool.
Yeah, I suspect doctors would usually just call it by the abbreviation, SHH or what not and leave it at that. Osteomorphs doesn't sound that bad as long as the doctor doesn't add the origin. Sounds like a standard Greek medical neologism.
Patients I guess get to find out when they start researching whatever condition on the web. Latin/Greek derived names do sound more important though.
The only thing I got from this article is now the cookies banner with slide from the right side of the screen and completely block the text on one side making it impossible to read through while ignoring cookie banner. So I just left the site
Biologists are using the genome expression in each kind of tissue to refine the number of tissues. These were counted observationally in the past. Some suspect the count could as much as triple this way.
