Of Mice and Bots…

But those who attended the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival on Thursday were able to do so after meeting Johnny Matheny: a man who lost his arm to cancer in 2007 and had it replaced with breaking-edge medical technology that now allows him to control his prosthetic arm with his thoughts.

The festival ran from Tuesday through Thursday on the Lower East Side. Each day, leaders of various fields, such as sports, beauty, and equality, discussed current developments and hypothesized about the futures of these fields. Thursday morning’s event—of which Matheny was a part—focused on the Future of Medicine, in which a series of speakers discussed a mix of both exciting and frightening views for the future of science and healthcare.

The primary theme that emerged from the event is the new boom in personalized healthcare-treatments and testing based on an individual’s specific biology. Speakers discussed using in-home DNA and microbiome test kits to screen for diseases. J. Craig Venter, the biologist famously known for first sequencing the human genome, discussed his organization, Human Longevity. He explained that by giving people the chance to sequence their DNA, they could learn what diseases they are at risk for and be better equipped to take preventative measures. His goal? To bring the average human lifespan to 100 years.

“We’re empowering people to take charge [of their own health] and it’s not easy,” he said. “I think it’s impossible for physicians to know all innovations. It’s not part of their paradigm to screen healthy people.”

Some predictions of the world of science and technology 20 years from now seemed a bit farfetched. Faith Popcorn, the head of BrainReserves, a marketing firm that helps companies advertise based on predicting future trends, proposed a future in which all care is performed by robots. “Bots are a lot more comforting than people,” she said, earning several eyerolls from audience members.

Compared to the future of other fields, the incorporation of technology in medicine tends to especially frighten people because of ethical concerns. During Venter’s speech, the primary audience follow-up questions regarded the level of privacy that patients could expect with his technology. Do we really want health insurance or life insurance companies to know all of the risk factors embedded in our DNA?

Ethical concerns in medical technology were further explored by John Carreyou, a Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story on Theranos. He described the process of discovering that the health technology company had falsely touted its blood testing capabilities in order to advertise his forthcoming book on the reporting behind the story.

“I’m here to tell you about a fake medical innovation,” he said, explaining that despite the promise technology holds, it is healthy to be critical when something literally claims to be a panacea.

The audience’s wariness of the medical revolution reached its peak during Kevin Esvelt’s talk. Esvelt, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained his project of releasing genetically modified mice on the Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard islands in order to eradicate lyme disease. The raised eyebrows of audience members reflected interviewer Amy Dockser Marcus’ ironic response: “That doesn’t sound scary at all!”

Esvelt attempted to justify his project, saying that the researchers work only with the approval of the communities that live on the island and that the genetic modification is based on naturally occurring immunities in the mice. Still, he admitted it is impossible to be completely sure of the experiment’s results—an uncertainty that he argued exists in all science.

“If a scientist says they know everything that’s going to happen, I would not want to work with that person,” he said. “There are risks to everything, but there are costs to doing nothing.”

Photo by Radhika Viswanathan