“So, what would you little maniacs like to do first?” This is not what White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said to the press corps during one of her briefings, but one wonders how often she wanted to say something like that. As she prepares to leave her job at the ripe old age of 28, I was thinking about the movie Weird Science, about how young smart people can do remarkable things. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, I highlight news about the health tech-related invention that was created by remarkable young scientists this week.
Other news about inventions – or funding for inventions – this week:
- Wearables are such a great invention to help manage people’s health care, that the Government Accountability Office suggested three policy options to help integrate wearables into clinical decision-making.
- Aidoc, a developer of clinical AI solutions for providers, and 12 U.S. health systems, launched the Diagnostic AI Consortium to develop shared standards for the evaluation and governance of diagnostic AI.
- ARPA-H, an HHS subdivision, awarded seven teams funding to develop autonomous robotic surgery systems. ARPA-H committed up to $175.3 million to the program for over five years to support endovascular robotics for stroke thrombectomy and microbots for minimally invasive procedures.
“You guys created me, I didn’t come from anywhere.” This is a line from Weird Science, a 1985 sci-fi teen comedy where two high school outcasts use a home computer and a government hack to digitally invent the perfect woman “Lisa.” If you’re willing to set aside the wildly inappropriate 1980s humor, there are life lessons in throwing a huge party organized by your invented perfect woman to get outside your comfort zone when you’re a couple of unpopular nerds. This premise is weirdly similar to the news this week: young scientists at Stanford, working with a collaborator at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, used a generative AI system trained on DNA to design a synthetic virus. The parallels to Weird Science – students creating a living organism by using their computers – is so helpful. The Stanford breakthrough is new and huge and I don’t begin to understand it – but some people are saying that it will allow us to better control deadly bacterial infections. Even if the Stanford kids don’t throw a party, there is much to be learned from the Weird Science movie; the boys learn that some pretty bad consequences can come from such an incredible invention. The movie-version consequences are that very rude party guests make motorcycle tire tracks on Mom’s nice wood floor (bad). The consequences of the Stanford-led scientific breakthrough may allow bad people to create deadly pathogens for biological weapons (worse). AI experts are gently suggesting that our surveillance systems can’t stop these things from getting into the hands of the bad people right now. Our Weird Science movie heroes express similar angst when their invented perfect woman makes their lives dangerously chaotic. Lisa smiles and says: “If you want be a party animal, you have to learn to live in the jungle.”
