Chapter 18
Future Developments
Our preferences do not determine what’s true.
— Carl Sagan
Summary Our intelligence allows us to dream up new technologies and new
techniques for bettering our lives or for enhancing our individual and collective
survivability. We can anticipate, in the not-too distant future, real Star Trek
‘tricorders’, and computer diagnostics which looks at all possible diseases based
on symptoms, recommending tests and treatments. Drug testing and treatments will
be done within computer simulators, not on humans or animals. We need not be
passive in the direction we think desirable, nor succumb to our primitive instincts.
The social polarization and aggression due to our ‘We-They’ syndrome should not
be taken as inevitable, since we can see the follies and pathologies of our destructive
tendencies.
18.1 DNA Sequencing
There are now machines which can take a given human’s chromosomes and produce
a complete sequencing of base-pairs within the DNA.
The efforts continue for very rapid and inexpensive DNA sequencing. Two new
possibilities are (1) Laying the DNA down on a substrate groove, which may even
have the ability through molecular interaction with the sugar-phosphate groups
to unwind the helix. Then a scanning tunneling microscope could read the bases
sequentially; or (2) The DNA can be pulled through a nanopore, and the cross
tunneling current will vary depending on the base-pair passing through.
Human history, planetary history, living organism’s habitat and behavior, and the
RNA/DNA sequencing of all life forms should be stored several places, including
away from the Earth, as a safeguard against natural or man-made catastrophes, and
to study and possibly regenerate lost species.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
W. C. Parke, Biophysics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44146-3_18
619
Future Developments
Our preferences do not determine what’s true.
— Carl Sagan
Summary Our intelligence allows us to dream up new technologies and new
techniques for bettering our lives or for enhancing our individual and collective
survivability. We can anticipate, in the not-too distant future, real Star Trek
‘tricorders’, and computer diagnostics which looks at all possible diseases based
on symptoms, recommending tests and treatments. Drug testing and treatments will
be done within computer simulators, not on humans or animals. We need not be
passive in the direction we think desirable, nor succumb to our primitive instincts.
The social polarization and aggression due to our ‘We-They’ syndrome should not
be taken as inevitable, since we can see the follies and pathologies of our destructive
tendencies.
18.1 DNA Sequencing
There are now machines which can take a given human’s chromosomes and produce
a complete sequencing of base-pairs within the DNA.
The efforts continue for very rapid and inexpensive DNA sequencing. Two new
possibilities are (1) Laying the DNA down on a substrate groove, which may even
have the ability through molecular interaction with the sugar-phosphate groups
to unwind the helix. Then a scanning tunneling microscope could read the bases
sequentially; or (2) The DNA can be pulled through a nanopore, and the cross
tunneling current will vary depending on the base-pair passing through.
Human history, planetary history, living organism’s habitat and behavior, and the
RNA/DNA sequencing of all life forms should be stored several places, including
away from the Earth, as a safeguard against natural or man-made catastrophes, and
to study and possibly regenerate lost species.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
W. C. Parke, Biophysics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44146-3_18
619