Tokyo Babylon

I always get a kick out of reading what ‘the’ future tech will be for this century. You always hear the same two, it will be biotech and nano-tech, basically a race to see who can get smallest fastest, kinda like a man trying to get the viagra out of his system before a medical examination.

I think one of the reasons you always hear about these two is that it always takes a lot of money to do R&D in these areas, and investment goes up when something is a buzz word. It’s your standard chicken and egg scenario. We can’t do the R&D till we get the money and we can’t get the money till we make a breakthrough in our R&D. So what we’ll do is make sure the potential of our field as a future money spinner gets as much airplay as possible. Granted both of them have tremendous potential but they’re not the only players in town or, I would argue, even the most cost effective in terms of input/output or benefits.

There are so many tech choices out there that are cheap to execute and bring economic and social benefits quickly. Here’s just a quick review of the few that I’ve found..

When you clean rice you extract the hard shell that covers the rice seed. This is called the husk. In many places it is burned in heaps behind the milling plant. However if you replace half the portland cement of concrete with rice husk ash you get stronger, lighter, cheaper concrete that’s less subject to concrete cancer. Furthermore if a portion of that comes back to the rice farmer you won’t have Koreans stabbing themselves through the heart at WTO talks shouting the WTO kills farmers.

The control and treatment of malaria is another one. What is a 10% increase in battery efficiency thanks to nano-tech compared with wiping out malaria. If you ask doctors about Malaria they will tell you that it’s difficult to control, that treatment has to keep evolving because strains become resistant. While some of this is assuredly true a good analogy for what they are saying is like trying to control a puppet with one string. Would it not make more sense to attack Malaria from a number of different directions, a bit like the layers of safety, failsafe after failsafe, on a nuclear reactor?

The simple fact that Malaria undergoes frequent metamorphosis should be a clue to establishing how to deal with it. The analogy I like to use is that the weakness of an octopus is that there are many arms you can grab hold of. Environmentally speaking every time the insect and the malaria parasite undergoes metamorphosis during its life cycle means that it’s a meal for something new.

First there’s environment modification, which in practice up until this point has meant not having stagnant water lying around so as to limit breeding grounds.

Easier said than done you might say, especially in places where there’s a lot of forests, where the trees have large buttress roots and between every two buttress roots is a small pond, and where every fish free, beneficial insect free crop-sprayed rice paddy is a massive breeding ground.

I would agree with you, which is why I say you have to hit malaria from many different directions at once. But environment modification is not just about turning buckets upside down.

It’s about encouraging bats to breed to catch the mosquitoes that are active at night. It’s about putting up nesting boxes for swallows for mosquitoes that fly during the day. It’s about water clean enough for dragonflies and larvae eating fish.

All of this is pretty much common knowledge, but something you’ll never hear about is how a specific breed of mushroom placed over a watercourse will release chemicals into the water which inhibit the breeding cycle of the mosquito parasite. Take care of your mushroom patch and you’ll have parasite free water at no cost.

Ok, so you’ve wiped out all the breeding grounds you can find, and mushroomed the large ponds and rice paddy fields (which if its organic means you get fat mosquito fed fish as well). The mosquitoes that do escape from hungry fish into the air with their deadly cargo then have to go looking for a human to bite. The bats and swallows eat a whole bunch of them You’ve probably cut down the number of biting mozzies by about two thirds.  The next thing I heard made me laugh. You could do worse than keeping some Muskovy Ducks near the house. These things are like insect vacuum cleaners, they wipe out bugs on the ground, snap them right out of the air.

You might ask why this should be important when the fungus has already wiped out the malarial organism in the pond. The answer is that mosquitoes are just the carriers. Mosquitoes give humans malaria, but infected humans pass the parasite back to uninfected mosquitoes who then take it back to some still water somewhere.

But you still have that one third to deal with. So the next step is putting up barriers between the mosquito and humans. A vegetable spray incorporating garlic and a few other herbal ingredients is an effective insect repellent for about six hours. It’s easy to make and easy to use. Some research suggests that the marigold flower keeps bugs away but the jury is still out on that one.

Ok so you know some mosquitoes are going to get through all that and bite people. That’s the point where medicine comes in. The Artemisia plant, presently the focus of intensive drug research, has been used to combat malaria in China since time immemorial. The tea is effective, probably more effective than any compound synthesized from it. Then you have your herbs that boost the immune system, promote liver health such as Echinasea, Tiger Claw etc etc By the same logic doctors use growth hormone to counteract tissue wasting in AIDS patients.

Once the disease is pushed down below a certain threshold of infection rate the disease is making new victims slower than those victims are getting cured. If you can keep all those safeguards in place then malaria cant come back into the fight by just mutating to unlock one safety measure, it has to unlock all of them. Complex systems of control is the answer. Thus I contend that the best way to combat malaria in poor countries is by giving communities the know how and tools to do it themselves. You can then spread the idea like a virus.

What else?

Well there’s little appreciation of the benefits of thinking in systems. Mostly what you find is knee jerk one step attempts at solutions that work sufficiently well that people lose interest in looking for something better. The Toyota Production System says that you should ask “why?” a minimum of six times every time you encounter a problem. The solution that you will end up with is no chipped flint spearhead but a laser scalpel. As Dr. Makoto Kawada said to me “everything starts with thinking”.

I keep coming back to mushrooms. Mushrooms are the flowering part that you see on the surface. Under the surface the mushroom is called Mycellium. Varieties of mycelium number in the millions and we know only a small fraction of what is out there. But mushrooms have adapted over billions of years to chemically break down things that cannot be broken down and eat things that nothing else will eat. Many of them live in close cooperation with plants.

An experiment in the USA found that if you grew mycelium and brussel sprouts together in the same soil you get double the sprouts and lots of edible mushrooms. Other experiments discovered that mycelium can eat petroleum; cleaning polluted soils till barely a trace can be found. Yet other experiments found that mycelium extract dangerous metals, even radioactive Caesium from out of the ground by concentrating them in their mushroom flower.

This is natural self replicating non-lab biotech. It’s cheap and you don’t need a PhD in Rocket Science to use it. It’s basic stuff that everyone can do.

So ask me what my bet for future tech is and I’ll tell you. It’s fungus, system thinking and design, and waste management.