Star Trek medicine
This story gives me hope that we may see just a bit more Star Trek tech in our lifetimes. Wired is reporting on a new medical test just approved by the FDA that physicians should be able to use that can identify respiratory viruses. The tester accepts a sample swab of RNA from an ill patient, converts it to DNA, performs polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to create copies, mixes the amplified DNA with color tags that will only bind to a specific virus, and identifies the virus and displays the results on-screen. The article mentions a New England Journal of medicine report that suggests that physicians get flu diagnoses wrong 83% of the time.
