Ray Kurzweil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There are few voices in the scientific community that have looked so deep and so far into our humanity. Ray Kurzweil is certainly one of these visionaries. He recently took the time to provide his perspective on digital health and the evolution of medicine. From nanobots to life eternal, Kurzweil keeps us thinking and imagining a future that is poised to change with amazing speed and relevance to our everyday lives.
Moving beyond the quantified self
For Kurzweil, the concept of digital health is much more than the collection of information. The quantified self is only a small part of the movement and is the basis for self-transformation. It allows us to redesign our bodies and lives from the "DNA" ground up.
My perspective on digital health is not simply to use information technology to collect and organize information, but rather to understand and reprogram the information processes underlying biology. Biology is after all an information process. It is based on our genes which are little software programs. That is not a metaphor, they are literally strings of data with two bits per base pair. How long do you go without updating the software on your cell phone? – it updates itself wirelessly on a regular basis. But we’re walking around with outdated genetic software programs that evolved thousands of years when conditions were very different. The fat insulin receptor gene, for example, says “hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season may not work out so well.” That was a good idea a thousand years ago but underlies an epidemic of obesity and type II diabetes today. Researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston turned that gene off in animal trials and these animals ate a lot yet got the benefits of caloric restriction including remaining slim and living about 20% longer. We have technologies such as RNA interference that can turn genes off and new forms of gene therapy that can add new genes.
At a company I am involved with, they are adding a gene to lung cells, the absence of which causes pulmonary hypertension, a terminal disease. The gene is added in vitro so as not to trigger the immune system, checked for accuracy, replicated millions fold and injected back in the body. This has cured this disease in human trials and is continuing to be tested.
These are just two examples of hundreds of essentially reprogramming the software of life.
Information technology on the fast track--one million times more powerful in twenty years
Is there a Moore's Law for digital health and biotechnology? The rate of innovation, for Kurzweil, paints a picture of innovation that is build upon both simplicity and complexity. From 3D printing that can to build a trachea to reprogramming genetic code, it's all lined up to take its place in tomorrow's clinical tools.
Another example is the very extensive field of stem cell therapies. Half of all heart attack survivors have a damaged heart called low ejection fraction. My father experienced that in 1961 and died of the condition in 1970. Of course nothing was known about stem cells then. Up until recently there was nothing that could be done as the heart does not adequately regenerate itself. Now this condition can be repaired with a stem cell therapy (not yet approved in the U.S.). We are growing new organs with the patient’s own DNA. This has already been done successfully in human patients with simple organs such as tracheas and in more complex organs in animals. The company I mentioned above has a project to grow new lungs for human patients. These organ regeneration projects use three-dimensional printers to print out a bio degradable scaffold and then populate it with stem cells. The reason we haven’t heard much about the embryonic stem cell controversy recently is that we can now grow the equivalent of embryonic – that is fully pluripotent – cells by reprogramming the genetic code of your skin cells by adding four genes.
The important point is that now that health and medicine – at least its advanced research and development aspect – is now an information technology, it is subject to my law of accelerating returns, which states that it is subject to exponential growth in its price-performance and capability. The human genome project itself, which was the enabling factor of this revolution, was perfectly exponential with the number of base pairs being sequenced doubling every year and the cost per base pair coming down by half every year. These technologies are doubling in power every year and therefore will be a thousand times more powerful in ten years, a million times more powerful in twenty years.
Longevity on the fast track--from science to practice
Today marks a point of inflection, where the "science of innovation" is moving into the practice of medicine. Digital health, information technologies and even the expanding role of the consumer will redefine the very notion of things like "organ transplantation" and "wellness" to embrace a level of complexity and utility that, until recently, wasn't even on our clinical radar.
We are now an inflection point where these therapies are beginning to enter clinical practice, at least the more advanced therapies. It will be a very different era as these “biotechnology” therapies mature over the next ten to fifteen years. We will be routinely regrowing organs with the patient’s own DNA, rejuvenating our own organs in place (without surgically replacing them), turning off genes that cause disease and aging and adding protective genes. Viewed this way, this revolution will transform all of health and medicine and put human health and longevity gains on the fast track.
Keep Critical! Follow me on Twitter and my other blog THINKOLOGY.
