The Edge of Medicine

Experts agree that we are entering the Golden Age of Medicine, when our everyday experience of being ill and getting better will be more like science fiction than today's routine trip to the doctor. Bill Hanson, director of the surgical intensive care unit at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center and an inventor of medical technology, offers true-life and intensely intimate stories about the way biotechnology is changing people's lives. • An electronic nose that detects infection, such as pneumonia, based on a person's breath • Robots with appendages that can feel their way around tissue, which will augment the hands of surgeons in the operating room • Computer health wizards that will advise and prescribe through your home computer • Computerized psychotherapists dispensing advice about emotional problems • Telehealth software that serves as a monitoring nurse for difficult to manage chronic illnesses such as diabetes. • Wheelchairs operated by reading electrical brainwaves for patients with severe neurological deterioration. Bill Hanson describes the human genius that arrived at these amazing discoveries, and how innovators are working to take these feats to an even more technologically advanced level. And more importantly, he discusses what the human experience will be and how we can prepare ourselves for the moral and ethical challenges that these awesome changes will bring. This riveting and startling account will make us revise our expectations of our own mortality.