Free The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus Page A

positively extend them is called near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). It’s been around for a while in very large and expensive machines found in major corporations and labs. In simple terms, without getting into the chemistry and physics of the technology, every chemical in nature has a certain and unique profile on the electromagnetic spectrum—the range of all possible frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. This means every object has a different spot on the electromagnetic spectrum, based on the chemicals that make it up; the electromagnetic profile of any given thing is the characteristic range of electromagnetic radiation it emits or absorbs. An apple, for example, has a different profile than an apricot or an aspirin. So imagine taking a handy little device and putting it up against an object and getting an immediate readout of all the chemicals in that item. That’s what you could do if you had a database of all the possible profiles.
    An Israeli company has done just that, funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Their low-cost handheld tool can study a pill, for example, compare the pill’s profile against a cloud database, and come back with “ibuprofen, brand Advil.” Besides eliminating fake drugs, it will bring peace of mind to patients by preventing pill mix-ups. This technology could also be used to point at a plate of food and characterize how much protein, fat, and carbohydrates are in a snack or meal. Or it could analyze your urine in a toilet and tell you how well hydrated you are. The possibilities are endless, and this kind of data may prove to be more useful for real-time medicine than what’s in your medical record.
    Even the medicine itself will become easier to swallow. If you’ve ever choked on a pill that was too big, help is on the way, thanks to three-dimensional printing technologies that are revolutionizing the manufacturing of drugs. In the future, 3-D printing that helps create everything from toys and mechanical parts to new organs, biological tissues, and prosthetics will also be employed to make smaller drugs that dissolve quickly, no matter their dosage. A pharmacy of the future may just be a printer and a drawer of chemicals, where the pharmacistis able to print, on demand, any medication, just by having its chemical structure.
    What gets me especially enthusiastic about the Lucky Years is that we’re encountering innovations and revelations, when we least expect them, that put past headlines to shame. In December 2014, for example, I did a segment for CBS This Morning about “the end of antibiotics” and the coming crisis of lethal superbugs that are totally resistant to all of the antibiotics in our arsenal. The British prime minister David Cameron had just released a report he had commissioned, warning that if antimicrobial resistance was not controlled, it could compromise the advances of modern medicine and swallow up to 3.5 percent of the global economy. 18 The report went on to state that increasing rates of drug-resistant infections could lead to the death of some 10 million people and cost upwards of $100 trillion by 2050.
    Currently, drug-resistant bacteria infect at least 2 million people a year in the United States and kill 23,000. In 2014, the World Health Organization warned that such infections were happening all over the world, and that drug-resistant strains of many diseases were emerging faster than new antibiotics could be developed to fight them. Compounding the problem is the fact that many drug companies have stopped trying to develop new antibiotics so they could focus on other, more profitable types of drugs.
    We blamed the antibiotic-resistant strains on human invention and profligate use of antibiotics in medicine and livestock. But just in the past year, we’ve realized that the capacity to resist antibiotics might be a natural part of bacteria’s evolutionary history. Antibiotics actually come from bacteria, which produce them to protect themselves from