this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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I've been following cures like this for years. There are three candidates in phase 2 trials right now that appear to work, they're mostly figuring out the doses needed and there's a big question on how long they last. Hopefully permanent but we don't know for sure.
Diabetics have just been so beaten down by this whole thing. I was told the cure was 10 years away 40 years ago. Even if the technology described here works we could be another 15 years before we see it. Researchers said it could be here as soon as 5 years, which is true if unrealistically optimistic. I believe the cure is coming but I'm not holding my breath until I'm actually in front of a doctor about to receive the cure whatever it happens to be.
It’s like all the revolutionary battery technologies, computer storage technologies, fusion, cure for cancer, anything with graphene in it, cure for immune diseases and all that. People just love to write clickbait articles about this stuff.
Developing these ideas in the lab takes decades, and turning those ideas into actual products takes even more time. When you see articles about these topics, you can be pretty sure you’ll never hear about it again.
Edit: Just to be clear: technology is going forward all the time, but news articles tend to fucus on things that are interesting or fascianting, and extrapolate from there. The technologies that actually end up becoming widespread might not be interesting enough to write about.
Looking at the price per kWh for commercial batteries tells me that we are seeing the battery revolution right now.
Graphene is already commercially used in some applications:
There are already very effective cures for some types of cancer (note that the differences between the many types of cancer can be huge and so the effort and time needed to create cures will also be very different. some treatments also are effective but not completely understood yet, like for bladder cancer)
Nuclear fusion devices are commercially used in material analysis (mostly in the semiconductor industry and in ore processing). There are different types in use – some even use thermonuclear fusion on a small scale.
It all seems like super crazy superconductor level tech until it becomes mundane and part of peoples lives ... then we stop noticing how amazing it really is.
Oh, I’m not saying that development isn’t happening. I’m just saying that the articles you see on the magazines and papers tends to focus on wild technologies like grinding metals into nano particles and using that as a battery. Yes, New Scientis (or was it Scientific American… can’t remember) actually wrote about that stuff and predicted that cars of the future would use this energy source. Ideas like that get reported bacause they sound cool, while incremental upgrades to plain old lithium ion technology gets ignored by the tech magazines.
I’m really looking forward to seeing graphene and carbon nano tubes being used in various applications. Scaling up your production usually is the real problem though. Even if you’re able to produce a few micrograms of something in the lab doesn’t mean you can actually turn that into a commercial product. The transition from NiMH to Li-ion seemed like that for a while until one manufacgturer (was it Sony or Philips?) took the risk and started making those batteries in massive scale. Consumers loved that, and before long everyone started using this wonderful new technology. When someone takes that risk with graphene, we’ll probably start seeing it everywhere.