“Hidden Breakthroughs: 69 Scientific Marvels That Shocked Experts but Were Ignored by the World”
How to land humans on the moon. Incredible technology, but no one was interested in developing it further. There is still some talk of it, and that technology would still exist, but nothing has been done.
The DAA pills that essentially cured Hepatitis C 90% of the time. Lots of d***s treat the disease, but few ever cure.
CRISPR-Cas9 is actual Jurassic Park s**t.
People who were born blind have had their sight regained due to genetic tinkering made possible by this biological tech.
Mosquitos can be eliminated, practically eradicating Malaria by editing the genes, which are then passed on to offspring, making them sterile.
Food can be, and has been, made more nutritious, as in the case of Golden Rice, producing more Vitamin A in impoverished countries.
It’s Gattaca in the flesh, and people just shrugged
Edit: A lot of people are asking “Why do I still have mosquitos? or Why hasn’t this happened yet??” and I can say that this technology is still extremely nascent.
It’s a massive achievement of humanity and another foothold in our ability to shape nature, but it is still inaccurate. Targeting specific genes in different species, let alone our own, is time-consuming and requires many trials to get right.
Targeting multiple genes, at the same time, is exponentially more difficult. Remember that genes are just DNA sequences at random events on the entire chain. And each sequence is rarely actually next to each other on the chain.
Some of you have also mentioned that we don’t fully understand the effect this would have on not only one species but all those others that interact with whichever we were trying to alter.
In short.. It’s incredibly high-tech, and with incredible technology comes incredible questions and incredible consequences that need to be considered before fully deploying.
AlphaFold 2 has a very real chance of being the most transformative tool in the history of the biological sciences. It’s open source and free to download, which means that any bio lab in the *world* can get ahold of it, and because it’s open source it’s easy to adapt to specific situations, even more than a CCNN normally is, which is a *lot.* The research currently being done with AlphaFold’s help will shape the entire human experience for decades, at least, and it’s comparatively *brand new.*
But a lot of people are yelling at the top of their lungs about AI in the abstract, in both directions, and actual developments get drowned out by the vitriol. It feels surreal to know that we may have hit on something comparable, in terms of influence on human society, to the invention of the clay-fired brick, and no one seems to notice.
Claude Shannon and information theory. It took a while to grab hold and for the technology to catch up, but computers, cell phones, streaming, www, etc. would have been significantly delayed for not his work.
1. The discovery of gravitational waves. Which should open a whole new way to see the universe, including events before the ionization event in the early universe.
2. Ai tools that can efficiently determine the structure of proteins, which was proceeding very slowly before this discovery.
PCR technology turned genetics into a productive science in a way that very few people realize.
Prion disease.
People don’t really understand it and so they shrug it off to the point that I have seen people giving away deer meat that was chronic wasting disease positive and someone picked that meat up to consume. Then, I was banned from the group for freaking out about it.
Not a scientist, but quantum entanglement is pretty f*****g cool. Most people have no idea what it is, though. Hell, I barely understand it, just have a gist.
The fax modem. It was invented in 1843 or so, but sat around for 120 years because everyone just sort of shrugged and didn’t really know what to do with it until the Internet was invented. Most people think of it as being heavily in use in the 1970s and 1980s and whatever, but no– it’s a 19th century invention that got a collective shrug from the cowboys of its day.
140 year old DNA evidence may have identified the identity of Jack the Ripper.
From a February 15th article on the New York Post:
“English historian and author Russell Edwards said DNA found on a shawl recovered from the scene of one of the k**ler’s vicious slayings was tested, revealing the butcher who terrorized Victorian London’s East End in the late 1800s was a 23-year-old Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski — who died in a mental institution in 1919.
“When we matched the DNA from the blood on the shawl with a direct female descendant of the victim, it was the singular most amazing moment of my life at the time,” Edwards told “Today” in Australia. ”
