It’s that season again. No, not hurricane season. Not duck or rabbit season. It’s flu season, and being down and out has given me time to reflect on just how far we have come towards a healthy lifestyle, and maybe how much farther we have to go.
One of my favourite anecdotes on the triumphs of humanity over disease, is the eradication of smallpox. Here is a disease that goes back thousands of years, afflicting even the ancient Pharaohs, and has survived by continuously afflicting humanity. The disease had no non-human reservoirs, and therein laid its demise. Dr. Edward Jenner proved in 1796 that a related virus that affects cows could be used to prepare the body for an infection from smallpox. From the Latin word for cow, ‘vacca’, he derived the word ‘vaccine’. Almost two centuries later in 1976, we celebrated the end of an infection of humanity that had claimed about 400 million lives alone in the 20th century.
I feel the story is important, not because of its accomplishment, but for what it represented in terms of technical skill. The coordinated production, shipment, and administration of a preventative cure to everyone on the planet in a timely enough fashion to actually destroy an extremely virulent and tiny form of life. Philosophers across the ages have described the factors that end life; death, war, famine, and disease. This is the triumph over disease.
Remember in the cartoons when the heroes would get into a small submarine and shrink down to enter a friend’s body and fight off the diseases? We’re there already. A few years ago, surgeons started using tools that patients swallow and the operator can control remotely, reducing the need for cutting into the body for tissue samples. Presumably the tiny scalpels retract before it lets itself out the back. Every year the robots get smaller and the technology gets more developed and better at what they do. Maybe one day, we all will have a small robot living inside of us, detecting diseases, administering cures, fixing tears and holes, and more, all automatically. At night, it would sneak up to your mouth and clean the backs of your teeth for you, floss in all the places you missed.
How about something I feel we could easily accomplish in the modern era? Proper nutrition is the cornerstone of anyone’s health, and always has been since antiquity. Well, extensive research has yielded the detailed dietary needs of the human body as it grows. Why don’t we create a place on the internet where we could not only access all of this data, but also share meal ideas; a Wikipedia mixed with a Facebook of foods. In the process, we participate in a massive cultural exchange, find our own path towards a healthy diet, and create a timeline and a resource for the future. Who knows what such a massive amount of information could yield long term as well? Smarter crop planning as we understand our collective diets, a fuller understanding of the relationship between diet and different illnesses, and coming a step closer towards wiping out another pillar of evil; famine.
In my wildest dreams, I’d imagine that we would achieve immortality through genetics. Our DNA is extremely long and complicated, but could be thought of as a binary sequence. Instead of ones and zeroes, we have four base pairs. The order of these pairs was assembled randomly and saw much of its expansion during the wild west of Earth’s history; when everything was single-celled and dog ate dog to survive. Sometimes there would be a Jonah and the whale type story, and the smaller bacteria would survive within the larger one indefinitely; this is what led to the mitochondria and the importance of mitochondrial DNA. Once we made the jump to multicellular organisms, we were just re-scrambling all of our genetic noise until a more useful pattern came out.
Now imagine we could re-order that DNA. Now that we understand how DNA translates into proteins, we can restructure our genetic code to make sure that everything is where it should be, spell-check it for spelling mistakes that would leak to heart disease later in life, or Alzheimer’s. Maybe make sure we grow up with thick bones that don’t break and grow to be seven feet tall? Imagine if we changed what used to be the dark corner of the evolutionary locker room floor into a well ordered library of genetic sequences that would most efficiently use the nutrients we take in. Would we live to the very limit of our existence? What would that even be?
It’s only a string of neat inventions and innovations away!