Freyburg

TEDMED is the newest offshoot of TED, the conference/video channel that brings big ideas to the Internet in digestible videos. Biotech and medicine have reached the point where an entirely new site dedicated to just medicine is now viable. The site is pretty sparse at the moment, but I’m sure it’ll be well populated with great videos inside of a month. Also, the opening graphics for the videos, which consist of CG flybys through the nervous system, are pretty damned cool.

Here’s an interesting video about growing regenerated organs:

Fast Company has come out with a well-written but flawed story about how little genetic research has done to improve our health. Which would be fine and dandy, were it true or if the writer of the article, David Freedman, had the slightest bit of foresight. Freedman delineates how many promises were made once the human genome was decoded, and how far we’ve come in the 10 years since that event. And to be fair, there hasn’t been a huge leap in progress…yet. But biotech is roughly at the place computing was in 1980. Today we carry around the equivalent of a Cray supercomputer in our pocket, use cameras that recognize faces, shoot HD video onto tiny cards and network with people around the world. We have made some progress, with recent gene therapy breakthroughs ending color blindness in monkeys and restoring immune systems. We’re on the bottom end of a big curve with genetics and biotech, and I think ten years from now people will look back at this article and scoff, if they even remember it all.

Stewart Brand made a name for himself with the Whole Earth Catalog and the “back to the land” movement (though always with the caveat of networked communication and other high-tech innovation), but he’s now changed his opinions, and says that cities actually help the environment by reducing population (less kids born in cities than in the countryside) and letting subsistence-framed land go back to its natural state.

I’ve really been getting into the latest developments in biotech, and Juan Enriquez, an eminent smartypants who runs the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, gave an amazing talk at the TED conference about the frankly astonishing things developing in the field that promise serious medical breakthoughs in the next 20 years. Check it out below.