These kinds of technological advances in medicine are important because they benefit the ailing, but they're also thrilling for the science alone. On TV, on the Web, in the pages of my monthly Scientific American magazine, each new solution seems more amazing than the last.
Smart bandages like this can help target-heal wounds and treat problem areas (sort of like this). A different smart bandage is in the works at a nearby lab at Massachusetts General Hospital. Treated with dye, this traffic-light bandage reacts with oxygen in a visual litmus test that colors the bandage green if the wound is healing well, yellow if it's worrisome, and red if the skin isn't getting enough oxygen -- all without disturbing the fragile, still-knitting tissue underneath.
That's miles more advanced than the typical way healthcare professionals check on how well a wound, like a skin graft for burn victims, heals. "You know the state-of-the-art test is for wound-healing now?," Conor Evans, one of the lead chemists of the traffic-light bandage asked me. "You smell it." I mean, wow, right? Elegantly ingenious ideas like these abound. A lot of researchers are experimenting with 3D-printed organs, stuff that at least one cardiovascular researcher, Stuart Williams of the University of Louisville, calls "bioficial" -- printing cells into living tissue. (If you've seen Marvel's "Age of Ultron", you'll get the gist. Dr. Helen Cho's Cradle machine, which helps rebuild superheroes' damaged tissue, is a similar idea.) But here's another use in the same vein:
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center are implanting specialized proteins onto a 3D-printed plastic meniscus to spur stem cells into rebuilding that knee cartilage on their own (the polymer part eventually disintegrates). Right now it's been tested on sheep, but results are promising. We are wonderstruck by these life-prolonging, life-saving discoveries that make me shake my head with awe and admiration for the mechanical engineers, medical researchers and assistants who continue trial after trial, year after year.
We can't imagine it's always glamorous work, and more than one researcher has told me that out-of-the-box approaches can be hard to fund. For every doctor, scientist or engineer who ever won a once-in-a-lifetime award or scored a national magazine cover for his or her medicine-altering achievement, how many more spend their days struggling for answers or devising cures that never seem to catch hold? Some of these researchers are people who could have, if they had chosen a slightly different track, taken jobs with high-paying tech firms, thinking up new ways to shrink silicon wafers into ever-smaller packages, or more efficiently collect data about people's lives. I'm glad they didn't.
"In a university, you're doing it for the love of science, not for the pay," said my aunt, Barbara Truitt, a scientist and technician with Case Western Reserve University's genomics lab, which deals with DNA sequencing. With 40 years of experience under her belt, my aunt designs research experiments and analyzes results. "If I were a legal secretary," she told me over the phone, "I might be paid more." Truitt spent eight years in college and graduate school combined to train for her field, which constantly changes as new methods and discoveries develop.
We mean, can you remember the last time you felt your absolute worst? Maybe it was the flu, perhaps it was a more serious, lingering condition. We don't want to live forever, and that's not what life-prolonging technologies are about. They're about easing pain and recovering ability, staving off an eternity of lost moments, bringing families and friends together for a few more good years. If there's nothing more precious than life, then there's no branch of technology more urgent than this.
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