Medicine in the Future: From Surgery in Zero G to New Treatments for Disease
Health care is changing rapidly, with new methods, new instruments, and new drugs. And it'll change even more in future. Health care in space is complicated. Microgravity, cosmic radiation, distances ... it requires a lot of rethinking. Why doesn’t blood pool? Why are inhaled anesthetics risky to the surgeon as well as the patient?
Z Aung: Doctor
Rivqa Rafael: Writer
Dr. Perrianne Lurie: Public Health Physician
Benjamin Hewett: NASA Management Analyst
OK – so none of these people write SF about any kind of medicine…that was probably…less interesting than it could have been.
I’ve been reading science fiction with doctors in it since I was thirteen – FRANKENSTEIN (1818) by Mary Shelley, DOCTOR TO THE GALAXY (1965) by AM Lightner, STAR SURGEON (1959) by Alan E. Nourse, the SECTOR GENERAL novels of James White (1962), the STAR DOC series (2010) by SL Viehl, and (of course) ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1972) (and other medic-ally books by Michael Crichton, SPACESHIP MEDIC (1970) by Harry Harrison, I AM LEGEND (1954) by Richard Matheson as well as the ones listed below. My favorite author, Julie Czerneda has a series that’s clearly based on biology and medicine, the SPECIES IMPERATIVE (2004); and an old standby, David Brin’s UPLIFT (1980) universe books.
I’m at work on a series (unpublished so far) in which two cultures – one recklessly genetic engineers whose definition of Human is so broad as to be effectively useless; the other relentlessly hard technologists whose definition of Human is someone who is 65% or more Original Human DNA (as compared to the Original Human Genome Project – 2003) – and if you’re not, you are not Human, but a sort of smart animal.
In it, a character whose genes are easily cloned,[much as the cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks were for the first “immortalized Human cell line” as detailed by Rebecca Skloot (2010), The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks)], has been repeatedly cloned since the mid-21st Century because he is what they have discovered, a “moral soldier”; quite different from the disastrous cloning work Humanity did to create the “perfect soldier”. (Which I HAVE written about, the first story being “Road Veterinarian” (ANALOG, September/October 2019)). They did, and then spent almost a century eradicating that gene line.
I want to play with this concept, but I would have loved to have listened in on the discussion (if there was one! It was the World’s First Virtual Science Fiction Convention; not sure if they Google Met, Zoomed, or some other platformed…
At any rate, the issues I’m looking at in a novel (the wip title is REFORMATION IN THE SKIES OF RIVER or possibly just IN THE SKIES OF RIVER) I’ve started working on, are the ones above. As well, medical practices and health care are also something I’m sure they talked about, though I find myself hoping it didn’t devolve into a “Smash Trump” tirade about Universal Health Care and how that will solve all of our problems (as well as creating new gun laws to stop gang fighting…oh, doesn’t seem to have worked in Sweden, either…and then devolving into a political rally…)
Sorry, didn’t mean to go there, but like everything else, medicine has become a highly charged political topic – rightly so, actually – but it could do without the political posturing and virtue signaling that appear to go with it.
I don’t think ANY of the books above actually deal with health care so to speak! The medical miracles just appear to “happen” without research or any kind of inequity or disagreement. STAR TREK seems to have solved the problem: “ Later on, while Kirk was having dinner with Gillian Taylor in a restaurant and was unable to pay there, Gillian asked sarcastically, ‘Don't tell me they don't use money in the 23rd century,’ and Kirk earnestly replied, ‘Well, we don't.’” (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home).
Even in some novels I’ve read recently, injured people are just “popped into the auto-doc” and fixed.
There’s something for me to consider here, and to tell you the truth, I’ve got an evern better handle on TSOR; so thanks!
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