>>12100639Gene therapy has really taken off. Its being used regularly now to cure eyesight issues, among other things.
Funding in science continues to be bipartisan, shockingly. Everyone in congress loves funding science (mostly health science). I do advocacy on the hill once a year, and it shocks me how much everyone loves funding science. I think everyone realized the economic/technical advantage it brings us over other countries.
Biotech has never been more awesome. I recently got a job, and its amazing how much is out there to do still. We are barely good at drug creation; I would say we aren't good at all actually, but several breakthroughs in drug prediction -> becoming an active drug are right around the corner.
Quantum computers. Hot shit. I work with these (DoD contract, we use one of IBMs with 53 qubits). Popsci made it sound like it could do everything, then anti-popsci made it sound like quantum computers can't do anything/very specific things.
The truth is, QCs are fucking incredible. We are barely scratching the surface. We are in the equivalent of "vacuum tubes to simulate single bits" stage. qubits are NOTHING like regular bits, its not just "a bit, but sometimes in between". Quantum logic gates are so bizarre. We have little idea what kind of algorithms can be produced because you have to think in quantum mechanics logic. We know we can crack RSA encryption when technology gets there.
Last year, paper published showing that you can simulate neural nets using just one qubit + data reuploading. It was pretty impressive, but also kinda shitty, because the need for only using a qubit is because you can't copy quantum data.
Truthfully I think several big breakthroughs will happen in quantum computing and it will be absolutely huge. This also hooks into the drug predictions; we are writing QC code/simulations for drug predictions to be ready for when the technology arrives.
