the public experiences biotechnology as decades of nothing, followed by years of everything once bottlenecks align
replyI think it's just a tech thing! Same as when the internet really got going or what's happening with AI
replySo we're waiting for the Apple of the medical world to take a bunch of preexisting things to be applied together in a way that makes the whole much more valuable than the pieces. Or we need all of the individual lions to come together to make the Voltron?
replyI think realistically we're waiting for someone in the top 10-20 richest people in the world to get cancer (or a close relative etc) who will then throw billions at research to try and fix the problem.
replyUsually it takes about a decade for most medical inventions to work their way through medical bureaucracy[0], so I'd say that 10 years ago we were at the stage of watching Matthew Broderick war-dialling with an acoustic coupler and reading Usborne Books telling us that criminals of the future would work from home, and today we're in the exciting early days of dialup, AltaVista, and GeoCities[1].
reply[0] The covid vaccines collectively were faster only due to the fact that when money is no object you can parallelise a lot of options and can pipeline the testing stages rather than waiting for full review and another funding round before progressing to the next stage
[1] Where they-don't-tile-but-we-did-it-anyway animated gif backgrounds are the metaphor for home kits to make random things bioluminescent: https://www.the-odin.com/gfp-bacteria/
We already had this. It was called Theranos.
replyI don't know if we "had" something called Theranos. In fact, I believe that was the subject of a couple of lawsuit because we didn't.
replyI'm not sure what this comment is trying to say. Theranos was a company build from the ground up on fraud. Apple, for all its faults, is provably at the forefront of technology used in personal computing devices.
replyI think you've captured exactly what they are trying to say
replyThis doesn't exactly make it clearer. I can think of two things it can imply. Neither make a lick of sense:
reply- Theranos was at the forefront of medical technology
- Apple is a fraudulent company to the core
Apple is first and foremost an affordable luxury brand that makes sleek hardware.
replyAnd theranos did that too? Theranos, a medical company, was an affordable luxury (??) brand that makes sleek hardware? In fact the hardware was not sleek at all, since it didn't function.
replyThe floodgates open = the market will see that at least some of that can actually work and make money => they will pour funding => new approaches built on that funding will start working, too?
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