Hmmm. This Friday doesn’t seem like it is happening right after the previous one. Subjectively speaking, it feels like two or even three days ago.

Good job, reality! (All it needs is a little encouragement now and then. )

Anyhow, on the with the SCIENCE.

First up, we have this article which has been lingering in my browser for a while, so I figure I had better cover it before it completely goes out of style.

Some Israeli scientists have invented a primitive disease-detecting nanobiocomputer that can detect multiple disease-indicating molecules at the same time.

But first off, a little verbal twerk I have to scratch.

Check out the very first sentence in the article :

Wouldn’t it be easier to deal with disease if our bodies just fixed themselves?

Um, they do, Popular “Science”, it’s a brand new innovation called an immune system. Everyone has one except for terminal AIDS patients and bubble boys.

Maybe you should look into it.

OK, that taken care of, we move on to the actual story. Basically, this Israeli team (I love how international science is today, don’t you?) used nanotechnology tools and biological parts to cobble together a simple computer that could react to the presence of certain molecules in a patient’s bloodstream and hence detect disease.

It’s crude stuff, but a very important step towards a wonderful future in which our immune systems are aided by biomachines that detect diseases and automatically release drugs to help fight them.

It would basically amount to making our immune and repair systems far, far more intelligent.

And speaking of the fight against disease, there is some very promising news in the realm of the global fight against AIDS : anti-retro-viral drugs show an extremely high rate of effectiveness in fighting the spread of AIDS according to two major studies.

Turns out, they not only keep AIDS patients from spreading the disease, they also can be used to keep healthy people from getting AIDS in the first place.

This is amazingly excellent news. We already have the disease on the ropes, at least here in the modern world, with people with AIDS living for years, and in a few cases even decades, without a single symptom and with perfectly healthy T-cell counts.

To then be able to keep the disease from spreading to others would be tantamount to a cure, although not a cure in the more traditional sense of a single treatment that eliminates the problem in the patient forever, like a vaccine, but in the more complex sense that with enough different treatments on enough different fronts, the disease can be stopped in its tracks in existing patients and kept from spreading to others as well.

And without new hosts, eventually, the disease would simply be gone. Off in the dustbin of history with rubella and the Spanish Flu, hopefully forever.

The challenge on the global scale, naturally, is to see if these anti-retro-viral drugs can be made cheap and easy to manufacture and distribute enough to be used on a wide scale in Africa, where the real problem is located.

Taking the fight against disease and disorder to a more personal level, in the United States, their FDA is looking to exert some regulatory pressure on the budding field of medical apps for smartphones et al.

Right now, they are merely talking in terms of things like guidelines and advisory documents and things like that. This is the usual first step, as it requires no expansion of powers into a new area, and the FDA is smart enough to know that it would be hard to enforce anything with more teeth anyhow.

The ideal solution would have to balance both the desire for a force against quackery and deceit in the world of apps and the realities of the digital age.

I think the answer would be for the FDA to offer a prominent and well-publicized certification program. With Apple, at least, it could be integrated with their app-approval program. Certified medical apps would be able to prominently display their certification and hence be more credible (and profitable) than non-certified apps, and as long as there is enough publicity so that everyone knows this certification exists, it will be enough for people to be able to make an informed decision about how much they should trust some medical app they got off a website somewhere.

That’s all of it for this week, folks. Tune in next week, when it will be seven days from now.