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Originally Posted by Boomer
Thank you, Ben Franklin. I will watch the Ted Talk later, but, for now, I looked up this brilliant scientist. . .
Kathryn Whitehead’s work as a “drug delivery engineer” is finding a way to deliver cancer treatment to target only the bad cells while leaving the healthy ones alone.
When discussing the genre of science fiction with students, I always said that good science fiction, no matter how far out its premise might seem to be, should contain a seed of something that makes us think, “Could something like this really happen? Do we see anything around us in our current time that makes us think about this story?”
As an example, one of the stories we read was Isaac Asimov’s “The Feeling of Power.” It is set in a future of space wars. Battles were being waged by spaceships run only by computers on board.
Then the government finds a man who can do math in his head — by then that ability has been long lost because computers do all the math. Those in power direct him to teach others how to do math in their heads — because it will be much cheaper to put a person on those warring spaceships instead of a computer.
That Asimov story has been around for a long time. But here we are in a time when most of us use calculators for our math and computers are doing the big math. And kids go to school clutching calculators.
Of course, as you know, science fiction is not written to be literal. The good science fiction makes us think, “What if?”
(It sounds like the “What if.” leap from the science fiction you talk about to the reality of the hope for targeted cancer treatment is a good one to think about. I am thankful we have brilliant scientists like Kathryn Whitehead.)
Boomer
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I think good, solid sci fi is written by people who read what's going on behind the scene and they expand on what it might be like in the future. Dick Tracey comes to mind. And although not science fiction, he did have a watch he could use to communicate on. An Apple Watch. ;-)
The scary part is when the writer doesn't see any positive ending. In Travelers the last episode left me depressed. Although a writer can take an experimental product and make it positive, they still don't know how man will use it.