Word: whole
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Predicting the future is easy; doing it accurately is a whole different matter. But current trends suggest that the most dramatic changes in medical care in the next 20 or 30 years will spring from a growing reliance on "smart" technology. Computer chips will become ever faster, smaller and less expensive. Medical instruments and sensors will continue to shrink. (One that already has is the formerly big, lumbering machine needed for radiation treatment; today mobile electron accelerators are portable enough to be used during some cancer operations, reducing the number of healthy cells that are damaged...
...acquired the mutations for spreading, the doctor of the future may call on matrix metaloproteinase inhibitors, a new kind of drug that can be taken orally to block the enzymes a tumor uses to break down the cells of surrounding tissue and invade it. Vaccines cobbled together from whole cancer cells or bits and pieces of those cells have been shown to boost the body's immune system, helping it recognize and kill tumors on its own. "This was all a dream five years ago," marvels John Minna, director of the Hamon Center for Therapeutic Oncology Research at the University...
Neither of these explanations need trouble us. We are not going to use cloning to make the whole of the next generation from one individual (though in the 1930s several eminent geneticists thought that when IVF became available, lots of people would rush out to choose prominent men such as Lenin as a father--which just goes to show how wrong geneticists can be about the future). Also, genetic mutations accumulate much too slowly to worry...
Equally alarming is what China's coal burning is doing to the planet as a whole. China has become the world's second largest producer of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, and it will be No. 1 by 2020 if it triples coal consumption as planned. But the U.S., the other environmental superpower, has no right to point a finger. Americans lead the world in greenhouse-gas production, mainly because of their ever tightening addiction to the car, the source of almost 40% of U.S. emissions...
...give a pile of debris. In the long run, we have to reduce the amount of material we use in the first place. Some progress is being made--aluminum cans and plastic soda bottles have become thinner over the years, for example--but more sweeping reductions will require a whole new kind of manufacturing process...