Toggle light / dark theme

When the first smartphones arrived, few people understood how they would change our reality. Today, our internet-connected mobile device maps our travel, manages our finances, delivers our dinner, and connects us to every corner of human knowledge. In less than a generation, it has become almost an extension of our central nervous system — so indispensable that we can’t imagine leaving home without it to guide us.

We are about to embark on another journey even more important to every individual and to human society. We are entering the age of genomics, an amazing future that will dramatically improve the health outcomes of people across the planet. Soon, we won’t be able to imagine a time when we left home without knowledge of our genome to guide us.

But this future isn’t a generation away. As early as 2020, I believe we will be living in a world where software uses knowledge of our personal genome to guide us, like a health GPS, toward choices that are appropriate for us as individuals. From the foods we choose to eat to the medicines we take to prevent or cure disease, from helping us avoid exposure to environmental risks to eradicating thousands of genetic diseases, genomics will reveal such immense possibilities that it will feel as if we can see and hear for the first time.

Diabetes is one of the leading health problems in our modern world and requires the careful management of a patient’s insulin levels. New research from Tufts University may make that process a little easier. In mouse tests, the team implanted beta cells that produce more insulin on demand, when they’re activated by blue light.

At the heart of both types of diabetes is insulin, the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels, allowing cells in the body to properly use it as energy. In type I diabetes, beta cells in the pancreas don’t produce enough insulin, sometimes because the immune system destroys those vital beta cells. In type II diabetes, a patient’s cells stop responding to insulin, or the pancreas can’t keep up with demand, meaning blood glucose levels spike to dangerous highs.

Managing the condition requires constant monitoring of blood sugar levels and boosting insulin levels as needed, either by directly injecting the hormone or through drugs that amplify the beta cells’ production of it.

“There are a number of critical technologies that have to be assessed and tested before we go to Mars,” he told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald.

His short-list includes reusable landers, new space suits, mining gear, water and fuel production plants and safe nuclear power sources that could be used to power habitats and equipment on the red planet.

Thirsk himself is currently working with the Canadian Space Agency to investigate the unique biomedical and health care issues involved in long term deep space missions.

A pair of new studies report “impressive” benefits from a drug therapy for cystic fibrosis, a deadly and devastating disease that affects tens of thousands of people worldwide, the director of the National Institutes of Health wrote in an editorial published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday.

“These findings indicate that it may soon be possible to offer safe and effective molecularly targeted therapies to 90 percent of persons with cystic fibrosis,” wrote the director, Dr. Francis S. Collins, who led the team that in 1989 identified the gene that causes the genetic disease affecting the lungs and digestive system.

“This should be a cause for major celebration,” he wrote in the Thursday editorial.

Prostate cancer runs in Jeff Nelson’s family. His brother, uncle and cousins have all been diagnosed with the disease. When his prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test results jumped to 5.5 from 4 in summer 2018, he knew he had to move quickly.


Jeff Nelson chose UCI Health and an investigative treatment for prostate cancer that uses high-intensity sound waves to destroy only the cancer tissue. He’s glad he did.