off the shelf cancer drug
Sometimes the future lies in the past. Many of us might say, ‘Then why isn’t it here yet?’. Maybe it slipped below our radar or maybe the radar didn’t look for the right signals yet?
Take the example of an article published in NewScientist recently describing an old, unpatented safe-for-humans drug called dichloroacetate (DCA) that turns out to be extremely efficient in battling a wide range of cancers. It’s been lying on the shelves for years. Many now ask: why did it go unnoticed for such a long time?
Somehow the article and the tidal waves it set off in media- and medicine-land reminded me of the problem of digestion of information (or the illusion of full digestion if you like). In one way or another, we have all run into situations in which we realized that the sheer amount of information we gather(ed), poses a digestive problem. The more signals technology allows us to pick up, the less we seem able to really see and understand what passes in front of our senses. Digestion takes its time, time we often do not take or we consume postponing …
On the other hand, regardless of the example above, it also points to the illusion of full digestion, i.e. time gives rise to new understanding that shape the lenses of our eyes and makes us aware of certain things of which the existence wasn’t even known to us before, so how could we have been aware of it? How could we have digested it? In any case, the past still has a lot of future in it and we need to look around, also backwards and not only ahead if we want to make the best of our future. Long live the historians who keep digging (every field should have them).
There are several metaphors one could use to describe the problem of information digestion, which in a sense all run into the issue of speed. For example, imagine looking out of the window of a speeding train. Unless you point your gaze towards the horizon, you see very little, yet an enormous amount of information/data passes in front of your eyes at high speed, remaining ‘undigested’.
Undigested information (I will not go into the data/information/knowledge/wisdom discussion) poses huge problems for example for surveillance cameras in many large cities. There is simply not enough personnel or it is too expensive to watch at all the material the cameras register. Cameras do get smarter all the time and true AI camera’s are around the corner, but for now technology cannot help us with all our infodigestive problems.
Image of breast cancer cell from News-Medical.net
Via Alex Burns’ Futuristics
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