Walter Isaacson Interviews MIT President Emerita Susan Hockfield on Overcoming the COVID-19 “Diagnostics Deficit” and How Convergence of Biology and Technology Will Drive 21st Century Innovation - Seite 2

“I was well aware of biomedical engineering, so I offered that as my understanding. He shook his head and said, ‘Well that’s only the smallest part of it.’ From then on, I just discovered so many new technologies emerging from the convergence of biology with engineering and the hard sciences. It’s an exciting story and I think it is going to be the technology story of the 21^st century.”

• On potential breakthroughs in medical treatment and diagnostics:
  
  “The thing that continues to haunt me about our response to the coronavirus is what I call a diagnostics deficit. This nation has not turned its mind toward the importance of diagnostics. For the coronavirus we are seeing it writ-large even today. We don’t have sufficiently accurate, sufficiently rapid, sufficiently cheap diagnostics. The countries that have managed to control the coronavirus are countries that have been able to track and trace. To track you need to diagnose at a level that we aren’t even beginning to approach here in the United States. One of the technologies that I profile is a new way to diagnose disease.
  
  

“This whole business of diagnostics, you don’t need it just in a pandemic. We spend 18% of GDP, roughly, on healthcare. While we have some breathtaking new approaches to treat disease, I can use cancer as an example, truth be told, we are diagnosing cancer really late in the game. It’s much easier if you can diagnose cancer much earlier – it would be a lot easier to control it. But you need a diagnostic with greater sensitivity.

“[Another] acceleration of transformations that has happened that will partner with these kinds of tests is video medicine, teleconferencing. I’ve watched my colleagues in the medical sphere here in Boston, some of the best academic medical centers in the country, struggling to figure out how to do telemedicine. Guess what – the coronavirus made it happen.

“While we always like to imagine that there is a lone inventor, truth be told, that lone inventor doesn’t have the impact that she or he would have unless they connect to a community that helps bring a great idea into being. One of the things that has pleased me enormously is in the face of this pandemic across the Boston region, people have come together to find these solutions in ways that I had only dreamed of.”

• On the “parts lists” – the building blocks – for the 20^th century digital revolution and 21^st century bioengineering revolution: