I couldn’t resist posting this story, as it speaks to everything this site is about. A TechTV article explores the growing phenomenon in which much of today’s advanced medical technology was yesterday’s science fiction. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, for instance, Commander Checkhov slips into a coma after falling off an aircraft carrier, tearing an artery just underneath his skull–an injury that frequently happens after falls, car wrecks, and accidents. Up At that time, there was little surgeons could do for a common brain injury except to drill holes in the skull to drain loose blood. McCoy shouts at the 1987 doctor, “My God, man! Drilling holes in his head isn’t the answer. The artery must be repaired!” Today, Dr. Michael Marks of the Cath Lab at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, California repairs torn arteries with a tiny balloon snaked up the leg, much as balloon angioplasty opens clogged hearts.
Neurologist and science fiction author Dr. Robert Burton, of Sausalito, California, wrote a novel in 1996 exploring the human condition called “Cellmates” about a human cloning experiment. But just before his book went to press, he got a call from the publisher about a sheep named Dolly. Burton had to quickly revise his book. “I actually had to go back and put in the new technology, which had been fiction up to that point, and was now fact.”
The list of sci-fi inspired technologies goes on and on. Surgical robots, heart transplants, 3D brain imaging.
“Science fiction is more popular in the United States than the rest of the world,” says Molly Coye, CEO of the San Francisco medical think tank, Health Technology Center. “We are double the rate for the rest of the world for believing that technology can solve everything.”
Science fiction sets the stage not only for great expectations, but also for false promises and disappointment. But to Robert Burton, it’s important to allow ourselves to dream. “Once you say, ‘Oh, that can’t be,’ then you’re sort of limited to common sense of today, which may be the foolishness of tomorrow.”