Almost-Possible Technologies

[Mr. Mask]

Fiction has plenty of impossible technologies, alongside the technically/theoretically possible. But how about nearly possible technologies? Ones that almost works, but some little detail prevents it.

Some theorized nuclear bombs would blow up the solar system or possibly more, fearing the chain reaction would go on a lot longer than it does (a few worried it may never stop). If a few details about atoms were different, nuclear bombs could be a lot stronger than they are now. There was some idea to reach light speed by making use of a donut shaped ring which apparently would have worked, but it would have needed an energy mass the size of Mars.

Can you think of any interesting technologies that are almost possible?

[Jeff the Green]

Pretty much everything Tesla worked on toward the end of his life. I mean, the Tesla coil's neat, but it doesn't actually let you beam electricity through the air for any usable distance. Likewise a few of da Vinci's inventions were limited primarily by the fact that he didn't have an internal combustion engine.

More toward my own field of expertise, Penicillin was a wonder drug, but we didn't fully grasp the implications of natural selection and now it, and most other antibiotics, have become useless for the scary infections. The same thing plagues HIV drugs and (to a lesser extent) chemotherapy.

Many things involving stem cells also fall under this category because people forget or didn't realize 'that when you find a stem cell somewhere it's not supposed to be we call it "cancer".

There's the early transplantation experiments, which, aside from being of the sort that would actually make the researcher deserve whatever PETA might throw at them (including blood [donated by willing human volunteers, of course]), failed because of the specific immune system.

There's the various things based on the Warburg hypothesis. (That is, the false hypothesis that cancer is caused by mitochondrial damage, not to be confused with the very real Warburg effect, which is the observation that tumors tend to use anaerobic—and therefore, mitochondrion-independent—respiration even when it's totally unnecessary.)

A lot of the pop-hopes (and fears, actually) of genetic engineering are this too. While scientists known for a long time that it is, and will be for the foreseeable future, really hard to impossible to change the genes of an organism larger than a blastula and that most traits we'd like to change in humans are not controlled solely by genes, are developmental and so probably can't be changed in adults with just genetic engineering, and/or are multilocus traits, eliminate one or more of those constraints and we'd be able to do some really cool stuff.

Hopefully climate engineering isn't this, but I'm not exactly hopeful.

[Brother Oni]

More toward my own field of expertise, Penicillin was a wonder drug, but we didn't fully grasp the implications of natural selection and now it, and most other antibiotics, have become useless for the scary infections.

While I agree that antibiotic resistance is a growing issue, it's not because we didn't fully grasp the implications of natural selections, it's because people got too hung up on the the idea of a 'miracle drug' and either over prescribe/use them or don't finish their damn course.

If antibiotics were used responsibly and properly, we wouldn't be in the current state we're in at the moment - I've heard stories of people from countries with less stringent regulations who buy a big bag of antibiotics and take them liberally at the first hint of a sniffle. :smallfurious:

That said, there is new work on finding alternative mechanisms of action and some drugs in development are looking promising.

On a side note, may I ask what your field of expertise is? I know there's a couple of us in the pharmaceutics industry on this board, but they tend to be downstream of where I work (Development) or in QC (the poor bastards).

[pendell]

With regard to almost-possible technologies, consider nuclear fusion (http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html). It's been "around the corner" for the last sixty tears, but Lockheed believes they have come up with a practical design. We can certainly hope so, but given the failures of the last decades there's definitely a degree of skepticism (http://www.nature.com/news/lockheed-martin-s-fusion-goals-meet-scepticism-1.16169) in the larger scientific community. The most important concern is that we don't yet have details on their experiments, and a secondary concern is the potential difficulties in scaling up from a testbed to a power plant.

We'll see.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Jeff the Green]

While I agree that antibiotic resistance is a growing issue, it's not because we didn't fully grasp the implications of natural selections, it's because people got too hung up on the the idea of a 'miracle drug' and either over prescribe/use them or don't finish their damn course.

If antibiotics were used responsibly and properly, we wouldn't be in the current state we're in at the moment - I've heard stories of people from countries with less stringent regulations who buy a big bag of antibiotics and take them liberally at the first hint of a sniffle. :smallfurious:

In the early years, when we established prescribing habits, we didn't understand natural selection (and, perhaps more importantly, horizontal gene transfer, which was discovered in the '50s). The modern synthesis didn't come about until the late '30s and didn't really gel for a decade. (For some unfathomable reason biological research was somewhat put on the back burner during those years.) Until 1903 biologists didn't realize that natural selection was compatible with Mendelian genetics (basically, they believed the "blonde is recessive so blondes are going extinct" myth), it took most of the next couple decades to really prove that it was true, and much longer for the idea to get outside of a small group of population geneticists.

Though, yeah, around the '70s liberal use became utterly inexcusable.


On a side note, may I ask what your field of expertise is? I know there's a couple of us in the pharmaceutics industry on this board, but they tend to be downstream of where I work (Development) or in QC (the poor bastards).

Well, when I said "more toward my own field of expertise" I meant "not the physical sciences." :smalltongue: I'd make a lousy pharmacognosist or drug chemist; I nearly failed OChem because my spatial reasoning and memory is so bad I sometimes still get lost driving around my home town.

My degree is in biology because my university didn't break that down into different departments, but other than the single required intro physiology course I studied only ecology and evolution, particularly a field called molecular ecology. MolEcol uses the math of genetics to figure out things about populations and ecosystems from sequence data, microsatellites, and RFLP (and occasionally other markers). Like figuring out the number of elephants in a region by collecting the DNA from the dung of a small subset of them or determining that a particular endangered robin species with only 500 individuals isn't in fact endangered because that's the highest its population has been since before the last ice age. Also molecular evolution and phylogenetics, which are looking at evolution at the genotypic level and determining the evolutionary relationships between species, respectively.

[Knaight]

While I agree that antibiotic resistance is a growing issue, it's not because we didn't fully grasp the implications of natural selections, it's because people got too hung up on the the idea of a 'miracle drug' and either over prescribe/use them or don't finish their damn course.

If antibiotics were used responsibly and properly, we wouldn't be in the current state we're in at the moment - I've heard stories of people from countries with less stringent regulations who buy a big bag of antibiotics and take them liberally at the first hint of a sniffle. :smallfurious:

People could be way, way more lax with personal antibiotics than they are now and it would barely make a difference. The bulk of antibiotic resistance is bred in agriculture, particularly the meat industry. One of the demands of cheap meat production is high population density of meat animals, and that's a haven for disease. Antibiotics are then brought in to try and control this, at a rate that dwarfs even the most paranoid hypochondriac pumping all the pills they can afford.

[Jeff the Green]

People could be way, way more lax with personal antibiotics than they are now and it would barely make a difference. The bulk of antibiotic resistance is bred in agriculture, particularly the meat industry. One of the demands of cheap meat production is high population density of meat animals, and that's a haven for disease. Antibiotics are then brought in to try and control this, at a rate that dwarfs even the most paranoid hypochondriac pumping all the pills they can afford.

There's also some evidence that antibiotics change the gut biota of livestock, making them gain weight faster. Thus almost all farmers give a steady dose of antibiotics even if they don't have that high density. (There are some farmers near where I live, for example. They do raise their beef cattle in open fields, which greatly reduces the risk of disease. Even so, they don't go organic and pump their cattle full of antibiotics.)

[Brother Oni]

People could be way, way more lax with personal antibiotics than they are now and it would barely make a difference. The bulk of antibiotic resistance is bred in agriculture, particularly the meat industry. One of the demands of cheap meat production is high population density of meat animals, and that's a haven for disease. Antibiotics are then brought in to try and control this, at a rate that dwarfs even the most paranoid hypochondriac pumping all the pills they can afford.

Any antibiotic resistance from livestock diseases still needs to make the species jump to humans and I'm of the opinion that such rapidly adapting critters need as little help as we can give them. All the information I've looked at indicates that the bulk of livestock antibiotic use is subtherapeutic, for the reasons that Jeff the Green mentions.

A quick check of the most commonly used livestock antibiotics in Europe indicates that they're mostly older class antibiotics (penicillins, tetracyclines, etc), so they don't share the same mechanism as all our antibiotics intended for use in humans. Over here at least, they're trying to cut down on livestock use of human critically important antibiotics.
I'm not sure what the situation is like in other parts of the world though, although my natural pessimism would say it's not as good.

[Knaight]

Any antibiotic resistance from livestock diseases still needs to make the species jump to humans and I'm of the opinion that such rapidly adapting critters need as little help as we can give them. All the information I've looked at indicates that the bulk of livestock antibiotic use is subtherapeutic, for the reasons that Jeff the Green mentions..

We've had enough diseases jumping from livestock to humans to make it a serious concern, particularly if we've done a bunch of work to immunize them to a bunch of antibiotics. As for the livestock antibiotic use being subtheraputic - yes, very much so. Jeff the Green mentions part of it, but even the disease control bit is a matter of just having the animals all on antibiotics all the time so they don't get sick, not putting them on antibiotics when they do.