Saturday
Jul252009
Welcome to BamH1 - the alpha version of Bio news for Nerds!
Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 8:25PM Over the course of the coming year I'm hoping to develop (with your help of course) a hub for those of us that are pushing the edge of the BioPharma envelope. It's hard to define exactly what this site will evolve to be but it's not a gossip or standard news website. It's a place to post/discuss bleeding edge biotech, medical and med tech developments from both a scientific and business perspective.
With that I'll leave you with a trailer for Transcendent Man, which is an excellent movie that I highly recommend about Ray Kurzweil and his believes in science assisting us in transcending the human condition!
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The fusion of biology and technology is reaching mainstream news more often these days - as an example, the Guardian (a UK newspaper) recently posted an article about bacteria able to solve the Hamiltonian path problem, an early but important step towards reproducing some basic computing operations in biology.
By the way, the research described in that link follows some work dating back to the 90s, done by Leonard Adleman - perhaps more well-know for his work on the asymmetrical RSA encryption system. Haven't been following his recent work much but this article has a few more details.
With the increase in computing power and optics on cellphones, we're seeing some early steps towards portable diagnostic equipment - medgadget wrote up a nice little article about the CellScope for rural microscopy last year, including pictures and video. As image recognition and analysis improve, you can see devices like this becoming phenomenally useful for on-the-fly field diagnostics. Mix in some mesh networking and distributed computing across the mobile devices, and you could co-ordinate a field response to an epidemic or even pandemic, sharing information about mutations and susceptibilities. It wouldn't replace a fully-equipped lab, but being able to bypass the wait for initial bloodwork could make a huge difference in quarantine situations, possibly even helping to eliminate potential disease vectors such as the local water supply.