The Prognosis is Good

Futuropolis by Popular Science

Being sick is no fun. There's nothing worse than a queasy tummy, or that pesky sniffle that just won’t go away. But what will illness look like in the future? Will we be dealing with the same old diseases? Or will we have engineered solutions to be super-human healthy? That’s what we’ll try to figure out in this episode of Futuropolis—the prognosis for future illnesses. Unfortunately, cancer isn’t going away anytime soon. But oncologist Jennie Crews tells us how our bodies can be persuaded to kill these out-of-control cells. On the other end of the life cycle, geneticist Santiago Munne describes a bizarre but not implausible vision of what baby-making might look like in just 20 years. And zooming out even further, David Morens, an NIH epidemiologist, talks about how humans and microbes have evolved together—sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. The archives are pretty optimistic about what modern medicine will be able to achieve. Whether or not our 1950's predictions are realistic, though, is another story. Plus we hear from the CDC’s deputy director Anne Schuchat, who describes what it’s like to be a disease detective working with microbial behavior she says is “stranger than fiction.” Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree—code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution, check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future. This episode is also sponsored by The Message, a new podcast from GE Podcast theater. Host Nicki Tomlin follows a team of elite cryptographers as they decode a highly classified radio transmission. To sum it up: extraterrestrials. Check out The Message, on iTunes.

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