Bioscience advances in the 21st Century?

Recently I had to research a biology topic for a possible book. As usual I started with Wikipedia to get an overall view of the field, so that I could then better drill down to the topic I needed to know about. Just a list of all the different biosciences was enough to inspire awe in me of how far we've come in those fields, and how many amazing advances may yet come in this 21st Century.

Here are a few speculations about those possible advances. I imagine you have even more.

One big resource for the biosciences in this century is the results of the Human Genome Project started in 1990 and finished in 2003. This map is now public and online, available for anyone to study. It's not the end of the study of the genome, however, for the Project was the result of only a few dozen or hundred samples, carefully selected and hopefully diverse enough to give us insight into all human genes. It could use more input from studies of unusual populations, such as tribes hidden from the modern world until recently. Too, animals and plants need to be studied to understand THEIR genetic makeup. Also, the maps give us mostly a picture of the overall STRUCTURE of cells. Much research is needed in cell FUNCTION.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project

Out of these studies have come technology for tailoring the genes of future generations of humans, which could also be applied to microorganisms, plants, and other animals. One such tech, called CRISPR, is now embroiled in a legal fight over the rights to use it. It will not be the last, for newer biotech products are likely to become ever more a multi-billion dollar field in just a decade or so.

There will also be ways to re-engineer ourselves, so that we become healthier, taller (or shorter), stronger, faster, smarter, and (inevitably!) prettier. Which will inevitably lead to wider ranges of what constitutes "pretty." Will tentacles, bigger or smaller bottoms, green hair, etc become fashionable - and a big market?

One of the biggest areas of possible advance is in ever more detailed understanding of our brains. Mysteries abound there. Such as How does memory work? How does creativity work? Does racism originate in our genes, or in the environment, or both and (if both) How do the two affect each other?

Another of the biggest advances will be in the integration of machines, especially thinking machines, into us.

Star Trek showed us one way to do this, by directly implanting machines into our bodies without regard to esthetics, resulting in the Borg monsters. I suspect we will more likely be ruled by esthetics, resulting more often in a Seven-of-Nine former-Borg approach, where the implants will be all internal, or hidden in decorative items such as the eyebrow and hand jewelry 7:9 wore.

I also believe we'll reject implants as inefficient, since it takes surgery to add them to us or to upgrade them. Much more efficient is to make additions to us wearable and so subject to quick changes. And how to connect them to our nerves? We could hide the connectors just under our skin, maybe with a flap of skin covering a nerve-connector slot. Or maybe we could make the connection via something like wi-fi, with radio transceivers just under the skin. All of which would lead us to the question: How to defend against our brains and maybe bodies being hacked and hijacked?

Albedo said:

I'm extremely skeptical you'll see anything like radical genetic modifications during this century.

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You could well be right. There are many thousands of genes in each human, and a similar number in other mammals. How they function to create a baby is an enormously complex process, as is how they continue to function as the newborn grows to adulthood and into senescence. Puzzling out that functionality is a hugely difficult process.

I'd guess that how genemod efforts will play out in this century will follow a process similar to the way the aircraft industry did in the past. It started simply with what were little more than box kites with a lawn mower motor to spin the propellers. Many weird kinds of flying machines were tried before we settled down to the more conventional ones. Metal replaced wood and fabric hulls, wings, and propellers. The jet engine was invented and developed.

More than just flying machines were needed. We had to create things which supported their use. This includes airfields, fuel storage and handling machines and procedures, and communication between air and ground. Communication systems had to develop to cover entire countries and cross oceans. Common procedures and protocols had to be settled on; communication no matter how advanced is useless if people and machines don't speak the same languages.

Beyond that companies had to be built to buy and run airplanes and air fields. Ways to buy tickets and get people and their luggage onto and off planes had to be developed and streamlined. And so on for many other direct and indirect inventions both material and immaterial that create a practical air industry.

I should mention one crucial family of inventions which made the air industry possible: the computer. It has two major parts: the math part, and the data storage part. Early engineers used slide rules and hand calculators to do the math, paper and punched cards to store the data. The computer replaced both and let them talk to each other without people having to intermediate.

One of my first jobs at Boeing was to help put together a system that engineers could use to store all this data for an aircraft, display and work on the data, and share it all between the several dozen campuses scattered all across this planet. The C-17 cargo aircraft for instance has over a million KINDS of part, from nuts and bolts to entire wings and motors. Each one has to fit with all the other parts, and allowances has to be made to be sure each part is up to its task, including each and every nut and bolt.

We face just such complexity and more when we start to puzzle out how genes work, and work together. When we start to try to change the genes in a few right ways, rather than the many many possible wrong ways, we will need computers beside which our current super-computers are as primitive as the abacus. Will we create those? Stay tuned.

Dennis E. Taylor said:

The problem with predicting technological progress is ....

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Happily for SF writers we're not in the PREDICTION business but the SPECULATION business. We lay out many alternate futures and so give humanity some warning of pathways to avoid and suggest ones to follow.

Dennis E. Taylor said:

… we don't have to be inconvenienced by nasty ol' facts or common wisdom. ... facts are overrated.

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It depends on what kind of story we want to write. Comedy, allegory, and the like have no need to be true to reality. More often we use facts and fancy the way painters use colors to create our stories, adding a dab of one and a swatch of the other to create something that FEELS true even though it could never be.

Just how much of one or the other is a judgment call. Heinlein suggested that one kind of SF assumes One Impossible Thing but keeps everything else true to what we know about reality. So people feel the same emotions as they do in everyday life, physical laws operate the same (except for that one Thing), our history and politics is that of the school texts, etc.

Other kinds of SF mix in more untrue things. Perhaps the most "impure" are alternate history, with whole timelines traveling in different paths than the one we know (or believe) true. Yet, in those, people are still people with all our flaws and virtues, even people who've evolved into superhumans who lack some of our all-too-familiar flaws.

What radical bioscience developments may come in this century? Past SF gives us some ideas.

Here's one. We discover why we grow old and figure out ways to prevent it.

I try to keep up with current developments in science (a near hopeless ambition!) and have come across several theories about why we age. Here's a clearly written article about the latest theory, published on the University of Utah's bioscience web site: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/basics/telomeres/.

Whatever the cause, it's likely to be complex, and ways to prevent aging correspondingly complex. I'd guess that the first methods will be only partially successful, the same way as the aircraft industry started simply and crudely and took decades to become smoothly functioning, safe, and cheap.

They may also be expensive, especially if we don't enact laws to put the brakes on predatory pharmaceutical industry pricing. Which could lead to only the rich being able to afford to be forever young. Which could lead to class warfare, or at least class friction.

Eventually the methods will improve, maybe to the extent that everyone can use them. How will society adapt when older people rarely die and make way for younger people? Will there be a population explosion? Will we need to enact laws which limit the number of children we can have, the way China did?

King Neptune said:

China repealed the one child policy.

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Right. It had succeeded in its goal: to reduce population increase and make scarce resources go further. But it also had undesired side-effects, among them many girl children being aborted or killed. This resulted in the "little princes" phenomenon, boys being raised as spoiled brats, but at the same time being the focus of too many of their parents' (especially mothers') dreams and ambitions and feeling overwhelmed by them. In addition, Chinese men now have fewer choices of mates, and must compete harder to win one. Leading to some of them importing wives from other countries.

Thus do good intentions lead, if not to Hell, to roads edged with brimstone.

My guess is that each country will have different laws, or policies, or societal pressures, to handle the problem of different ratios of old to young, rather than any world-wide set of solutions. This could lead to conflict between countries. It could also lead to conflict within countries, as different groups of people champion different solutions.

All possibilities for many SF stories!

King Neptune said:

My guess is different countries will try different solutions, but ... eventually Murphy's Law will kick in and ruin all the plans.

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No need to guess. Murphy always does. That's why engineers spend up to half their time anticipating and allowing for error conditions for any solution to a problem we create. We try to make the systems we create "fail-safe" and "fail-gently." Thus automobiles have become safer each year and will continue to do so, but accidents still happen.

Another major advance (or advanceS) that I expect to see in this century (at least that much I'm around to see!) is in understanding the brain, how it works, and creating technology to aid or even improve it.

We know a lot already. We know that it is a computer, in the sense that it takes in information, processes it, and outputs other information used to control ourselves and our environment. We also know it works in completely alien ways to existing computers.

Memory is not stored in discreet and exact binary digits, but in some analog way, as more or less electrical potential, and degrades or improves over time. Almost no thinking uses exact categories such as True or False, animal/vegetable/mineral, ice/water/steam. Instead real-life categories have the values of more true or less true, more this or more that or more the other: "fuzzy logic" rather than "discreet logic." The brain has parts such as the Visual Cortex which specialize in certain kinds of thinking, and other parts which do other kinds of thinking. Harm any of those parts and the brain loses that function. BUT sometimes other parts of the brain take over those functions. How it does that, and how we could help it do that, is pretty much a mystery.

Which is par for the course of biopsychology. We know just enough to know how very much is still mysterious. THAT Terra Incognita is what much of this century will seek to illuminate.