An interview with Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, Harvard University.
We have recently had occasion to have a chat with Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, Professor of Medicine and Director of Redox Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, in Boston, Massachusetts. He is an expert in aging and redox biology and is known for his characterization of the human selenoproteome. His research laboratory focuses on comparative genomics, selenoproteins, redox biology, and, naturally, aging and lifespan control.
Dr. Gladyshev graduated from Moscow State University, in Moscow, Russia; his postdoctoral studies in the 1990s took place at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland. Even when he was young, he was very much interested in chemistry and experimental science: he twice won the regional Olympiad in chemistry and graduated from high school with a gold medal. He also graduated with the highest honors from Moscow State University. This enviable track record is even more impressive considering that Dr. Gladyshev completed music school and high school at the same time and became a chess player equivalent to national master during his college years.
You’ll have a chance to meet Dr. Gladyshev at our upcoming New York City conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases, on July 12; if you can’t attend, you can at least enjoy our interview with Dr. Gladyshev below.
At least in the developed world, cancer, heart diseases, and neurodegenerative diseases are among the greatest causes of mortality. One emerging and very promising way to prevent or cure these diseases is through bio-nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology is the design, synthesis and application of materials or devices that are on the nanometer scale (one billionth of a meter). Due to the small scale of these devices, they can have many beneficial applications, both in industry and medicine. The use of nanodevices in medicine is called nanomedicine. Here, we will look at some applications of nanomedicine in curing or preventing the diseases that are most likely to kill us.
Early adopters, speculators and Geeks are never sufficient to bring a new paradigm to market. Mass appeal and adoption of a mechanism that requires education and a change of behavior is never ‘fait accompli’—until it reaches a tipping point. Once at the tipping point, it can go viral without a structured PR campaign and with risks tied only to technology and scalability.
What about early adopters? Can they drive mass adoption?
Somewhat, but not much beyond market awareness. Generally, early adopters drive mass adoption only for evolutionary inventions. For example:
But some inventions are different. Their use requires that users become acquainted with a technology or process that they didn’t realize they needed! [continue below image]…
The telephone and the Internet led to radical changes in the way we work and interact. You might think that the benefits of a telephone were obvious, even in 1876—and that adoption was driven only by cost and speed-to-market. But this is not the case. When the phone was demonstrated between two cities in Massachusetts, everyone was already aware of Alexander Graham Bell’s clever new gadget. But few people wanted one. A New York Times reporter scoffed that investors were wasting money, because the invention would be of little use to consumers and businesses. It didn’t occur to him that instant, ubiquitous communication (using a device that requires only a voice) would change the face of emergency services or allow close relatives to live far apart without wondering what happened to each other. He wrote that it was a rich man’s toy, useful only for hearing a voice from down the street.
What is required to shift Bitcoin into the mainstream?
Right now, only a small fraction of individuals believe that cryptocurrency presents an improvement over fiat (money issued by a government or bank). Most people don’t yet understand (or accept) that it is backed by something far more tangible than Dollars or Euros—or that it is more fair, or less susceptible to theft and manipulation. And because of spectacular press coverage, many people believe that it facilitates tax evasion, drug deals or worse. There are more misconceptions. For example, realizing that Bitcoin is open source, some individuals feel that other cryptocurrencies could improve on it, and displace it without recognizing the equity of past stakeholders. And finally, many individuals suspect that governments will ban it or issue their own crypto, making the whole issue moot.
Everything in the above paragraph—except the first sentence—is a false perception. But mass appeal and adoption is greatly retarded by false perception.
The adoption of cryptocurrency by mainstream businesses and consumers (not just as a payment instrument, but as the money itself) requires a series of events that are largely predicated on a recent past event. Think of this process as a row of dominos tumbling down—each one falling into the next domino.
The dominos have already started to fall. The process is slow, and it requires a few technical fixes related to cost, scalability, and ease of use. But they are falling and it is becoming clear that secure, decentralized, transparent cryptocurrency will replace nationally minted currencies all over the world. For some influential individuals, this is frightening, impossible or too radical. But this change is inevitable, because the cat is already out of the box and because the benefits to consumers, business and government are almost overwhelming
What are the ‘falling domino’ events and will they occur?
They are listed in the first article below—and, Yes—they are already occuring.
Philip Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA, hosts the New York Bitcoin Event and is keynote speaker at Cryptocurrency Conferences. He sits on the New Money Systems board of Lifeboat Foundation. Book a presentation or consulting engagement.
Take a glass thread a thousand times thinner than a human hair. Use it as a wire between two metals. Hit it with a laser pulse that lasts a millionth of a billionth of a second.
Remarkable things happen.
The glass-like material is transformed ever so briefly into something akin to a metal. And the laser generates a burst of electrical current across this tiny electrical circuit. It does so far faster than any traditional way of producing electricity and in the absence of an applied voltage. Further, the direction and magnitude of the current can be controlled simply by varying the shape of the laser—by changing its phase.
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