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Research and advances in medicine:
Curious minds work to solve problems
Medical science has made remarkable strides over roughly the past 75 years, beating back many once life-threatening illnesses and helping to extend the life expectancy of a child born in 2016 to nearly 79 years. By all measures, the pace of change appears to be accelerating.
Dr. Lynell Klassen, a researcher and professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, tells students they’ve got a lot ahead of them. “This is really an exciting time to be in medicine. All of the possibilities, the potential for understanding and altering our life functionality is greater than it’s ever been in the past,” he said.
• A look at the past
In the 1930s and 1940s, hospitals were full of young people sick and dying of routine infections, from tuberculosis to appendicitis. The group of antimicrobials, which includes antibiotics such as penicillin, changed that – literally overnight. Vaccines ended epidemics of childhood killers such as polio, diphtheria and pertussis, and provided protection against those such as measles and mumps.
Imaging technologies of increasing power and precision – X-rays, CT, MRI, PET scans, portable ultrasound, 3-D mammography, endoscopies with pill-sized devices, have given us the ability to peer into the body, in some instances to the cellular level.
• A peek into the future
The Human Genome Project gave us the blueprints; the next step involves putting that knowledge to use in medicine. The first gene therapy for an inherited disease, a form of blindness, has recently been approved. In the computing realm, scientists are envisioning the future use of artificial intelligence in medicine, as well as technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality.
(Julie Anderson. www.omaha.com, 28.01.2018. Adaptado.)
In the excerpt from the third paragraph “and provided protection against those such as measles and mumps”, the underlined word refers to
