[tt] [NSG] Boston Meeting -07/15

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Fred Hapgood <fhapgood at fastmail.fm> -----

From: Fred Hapgood <fhapgood at fastmail.fm>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:42:59 -0400
To: NSG <nsg at marshome.org>
Subject: [NSG] Boston Meeting -07/15
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Reply-To: Nanotechnology Study Group <nsg at marshome.org>



Meeting notice: The 080715 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the
Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of
Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the
manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below.

Suggested topic:  Moore's Law for health care.

This is something I think about a lot, but without getting anywhere: are
there policy changes would invert the exponential growth in the costs of
health care (a phenomenon now at least 45 years old)?  Not restrain or
inhibit, but totally reverse the sign of.

Let us assume that a major contributor to this growth is the biosciences
revolution (which is probably what most health economists would say),
where "major contributor" means a) that whatever else we do, if we don't
something about the bioscience side, exponential growth in costs will
continue, b) if for some weird reason the world was to shut down
bioscience -- perhaps because the resources were needed to pay for
health care -- costs would flatten out and over time, fall.

Since shutting down bioscience seems out of reach, an alternative might
to generate immense data bases -- in which everyone's medical records,
updated comprehensively and continuously by dozens of mobile sensors
buried in your iphones, bathroom scales, toothbrushes, shoes -- and then
throw those data bases open to researchers. Would that lower costs?  Or,
perversely, raise them?

I recently attended a talk at MIT on robot microscopes.  The concept is
to pull up millions of images, train the microscope neural-net style on
the kinds of images to look for, and keep at it until the tool is
consistently retrieving the right kind images.  You can if you like
then look at the rule base to see what rules the microscope found
worked for it.

It is easy to imagine showing this tool thousands of pap smears and
training it on the mistakes -- on the smears that the hospital thought
were OK but which turned out to be malignant.  Presumably oncologists
would then be detecting more cancers for about the same amount of money.
Can we generalize this?

 Andy Hendrickson offers the following as an entry for the most
 interesting link of the week:

 http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2008/DNASewingMachines.asp




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Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the
first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which
refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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http://www.BostonScienceAndEngineeringLectures.com
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood

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----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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