“Scientists at Duke University have developed an RNA-based editing tool that targets individual cells, rather than genes. It is capable of precisely targeting any type of cell and selectively adding any protein of interest.”

“Editing technology is precise and broadly applicable to all tissues and species.”

This sounds big.

I keep on feeling like one of these discoveries is going to turn out to be the penicillin of our generation where it leaves such an immense impact on human life and quality of life that its borderline impossible to imagine life without it.

You can imagine life without cars, without phones, without computers. But writers and people just looking back at the past regularly forget just how insanely different life was before penicillin. I personally would be dead 4 times over if it hadn't been invented and I bet most of the people reading this have similar stories. But it's such an insane impact that it's almost impossible for us to wrap our heads around and so instead we often times take it as granted, just a part of human life

That entire era was absolutely insane if you think about it.

I have been thinking quite a lot lately. Because as a programmer, it really feels like things had slowed down a bit (at least in new technology). And it wasn't until these tools and services that have come out lately that bring a serious amount of computing power with a few commands - which when it comes to speeding up development time is a HUGE deal. Things are picking up again, impressively rapidly. I find myself thinking about the future more these days, similar to how I was in the 90s.

So I had a shower thought, and started reading up on it to see if this actually was a thing, turns out it is. So, people in the past, pre Enlightenment and earlier didn't really think about the future in the way we do now. The highly educated academic types, anyone in science and engineering definitely had deeper thoughts on it, and I'm sure you could find many outliers. But generally speaking, your average person had no real evidence of changing technology, or at least nothing on the scale of what has been going on in the last 120 years. And big jumps in technology would happen more locally and could take 100s of years to spread to other cultures, if that.

But even during the Enlightenment, things were changing all the time. But to see it, to plot out the progress of technology during the window of your life would take a lot more thought and outside the box thinking to really get an idea of where things are going when you're older, or even after your death and beyond. Most people were just taking what was around them, and extrapolate it out and more or less the idea was it was all the same, just more of it and in better quality.

But it wasn't until this explosion of completely new technology like cars, planes, and then the computer. Things like penicillin as you mentioned were astronomically huge. Now your common person's minds were exploding, they knew that when they would get old things were going to be very very different, they may not have been able to accurately predict how, but they had a clear understanding that this is going somewhere much faster than ever before.

And I gotta be honest, I really do think we are going through one of those periods again right now. I think it's very fair to say that in 20-30 years, when I'm reaching retirement age, my life, the world, etc is going to be much different than it is now, on every single front of technology from medical to computers to space, to AI. And culturally. It feels like nothing was really changing between the 90s - 2010, just faster and faster computers, which allowed higher quality CGI and the expansion of the internet. These are big deals, but I don't think we really started seeing it rapidly increase in quality until 2010ish. And culturally, it felt like we were clinging on to the 90s that entire time - until we've finally started letting go (ignoring all the Disney remakes lmao).

There's a lot of terrible shit going on in the world right now, but ultimately I remain optimistic.

We’re on the verge of a technologically induced phase change of human civilization. We’re at a point where stand alone discoveries are a thing of the past. This technology could turn out to be a solution for 1000s of different medical problems. Penicillin is one drug that saved a lot of lives, the break throughs now are processes or algorithms that will have multiple applications and integrate with other technologies. Wild times to be alive.

You have summed up my thoughts. I try and visualize a the snowball effect in my in my head. It has been rolled on the top of a mountain with a huge flat area with little ups and downs, slowly slowly gaining in size, sometimes it would fall a bit and crack open and shrink in size. Then it starts getting a bit steeper, we're in the enlightenment now, then all of a sudden, wait, is that a cliff? I just see sky... nope, massive slope ahead. The snowball is now 20 times the size it was just at the start of the hill and it isn't stopping. The steep slope was pretty long, now it's levelled a tiny bit, the snowball is 2000 times the size now. The snowball then reaches another what appears to be a cliff, all we see is sky, where is it going? We don't know, but we're gripping on this time because we just passed the first cloud line and now there's another. This can be the biggest one yet.

Makes you wonder, are there other snowballs out there? Will we combine?

I try to keep track of what is possible in software and biotech, I’ve heard there are some hardware, materials, and energy breakthroughs going on. There are a lot of snowballs right now.

We're going to need some seriously good science communicators tbh. This shit is hard to keep up with.

Just getting revved up too it looks like.

Yea I was gonna say we’re like gonna experience several hundred if not more penicillin level discoveries and that’s an understatement

Where's the seatbelt?

No huge

The difference is penicillin is naturally occuring, meanwhile RNA-Editing would be impossible if it wasn't for computers

so can this kill cancer cells and keep healthy cells alive anywhere on the body? did they just cure cancer? all tissues and species???