Comments by "Theodore Shulman" (@ColonelFredPuntridge) on "Innovation Has Limitations (We're About to Find Them) || Peter Zeihan" video.

  1. Peter: You are misusing the term "biological drugs". You are talking about genetically-tailored drug-regimens for individuals. "Biological drugs" are just medications which are made, not by mixing chemicals together and letting them react, but by growing cells which make the medication you want. Biologicals are usually protein-based and made by genetically-programmed cells. Examples include monoclonal antibodies like Humera and Eptinezumab and the two monoclonal antibodies Trump got infused with when he was sick in the hospital with COVID. But this is mostly a semantic quibble. Biologicals and genetically-tailored drug-regimens are both frightfully expensive, so your general point about them is essentially valid.
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  2.  @texasjack  Yes, as I said, my complaint was only a semantic quibble. But it might be an embarrassing one in some contexts.
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  3. It seems like Peter is listing current Trends in scientific research (I say trends, but some of my friends were still in the scientific research business would say fads) and describing some of their current limits. That’s not a good way to think about scientific innovation. Technologies of the future, and if anything can save us from our demographic doom, it will be technologies of the future, will be surprising and probably very different from what we imagine now. Just as many or most of the futurists who, back in the 1960s, predicted the computer age got a lot of details wrong. Arthur C Clarke for instance predicted one giant supercomputer mounted on a satellite, with a team of resident astronauts on hand to replace the vacuum tubes as they burnt out. How many readers, before the pandemic, were aware that mRNA vaccines might be useful for preventing diabetes, or colon cancer, and that this was a good reason to fund researching the method?
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