Star Trek medicine is closer than you think.

I was a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation when I was in college in the early ’90s. My friends would videotape the weekly episodes and we’d get together for dinner parties to watch the season premieres and finale cliffhangers. I even did some housesitting once and binge-watched two seasons before binge-watching was even a thing. People have suggested that Star Trek science fiction writers foretold many modern innovations like fax machines, cell phones, and live face-to-face videoconferences. It’s hard to believe that these technologies are so commonplace (even outdated!) now three decades later. But what about the futuristic take on medicine?

Sickbay was the starship Enterprise’s medical center, which was stocked with monitors and gadgets that could instantly scan a crewmember for alien infections or mutating DNA. Computers were an important part of the show, and Lieutenant Commander Data was a humanoid computer with seemingly limitless computational skills. Star Trek was set in the 24th century, which is still hundreds of years from now. So, how close are we to this fantasy vision of medicine?”

Actually, we’re not that far off.

Think about the innovations we’ve made in the last 30 years. The Human Genome Project started around the time that the Star Trek: The Next Generation originally aired on TV, and it was finished 13 years later in 2003. That first human genome sequencing project took $2.7B worth of technology investment and innovation, which is still paying dividends today. You can now get your whole genome sequenced commercially for $299, at least on a Black Friday sale. Just to put that in perspective, $300 today is essentially a downpayment on an iPhone. Getting the entirety of your DNA sequenced still takes longer than a Trekkie episode, but we’ve shortened the time to days instead of decades. And that waiting time isn’t because the sequencer is slow, but because there is a pipeline of samples waiting their turn. Having access to your own genetics would have been unfathomable 30 years ago when Star Trek: The Next Generation was still airing in prime time.

We have more technologies that are Trek-worthy. Take Inductively-Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry, or ICP-MS, which is literally a particle disruptor. Technically, the instrument disintegrates a sample using a stream of Argon gas at 6,000° C to determine its full elemental composition. The technology was invented in the 1980s, and is typically found in modern environmental chemistry labs. Researchers have worked out the protocols for measuring the types and quantities of elements in human hair, blood, and urine specimens. For a fantasy TV show, this technology could have been used to diagnose an exotic illness like beryllium poisoning. But for modern Earthly problems, ICP-MS can be used to detect environmental exposures to common heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and lead. The instrument is the size of a suitcase, so it’s not exactly a handheld device. But the futuristic capabilities are here today and the assays are reasonably accessible and inexpensive.

One place where we’re still lacking is the Medical Tricorder, a shiny flip-phone type gadget which you apparently just have to point at someone to get their diagnosis. But if you can get past the requirement of being contactless, then we’re still on track for having a futuristic rapid global scanner. New blood-based tests are available now that can screen hundreds of metabolites in a teaspoon of blood. These tools can spot genetic and metabolic diseases, as well as biochemical bottlenecks caused by poor nutrition or enzyme inhibitors. They can also detect environmental chemicals that you read about in the news, like the endocrine-disrupting fluorocarbons that get into the water supply and never degrade. All it takes is a small sample of blood, and we have new futuristic tools for collecting that, too. New tech startups offer devices that draw blood from across the skin on the upper arm. There are still tiny pinpricks involved, but it beats stabbing your forefinger with a spring-loaded pin or having to show up to the phlebotomy lab for a blood draw. This is the stuff of science fiction.

Star Trek medicine is here today, at least in terms of the underlying technologies. The final frontier is the integration and interpretation of all of the biomedical data, and the development of a computer persona that will expertly interpret and answer your deepest questions. Of course, we have Siri and Alexa that are changing perceptions about how we interact with computers. But we’re still missing the master diagnostician that can compute probabilities, diagnose an illness, and recommend therapeutic solutions. One step towards this goal was IBM’s Watson, a computer that has made use of artificial intelligence to understand human language. Watson is well known as a winner of the trivia game show, Jeopardy!, which then went on to tackle healthcare. (Poor Watson never had a chance.) In the grand scheme of things, it’s a relatively simple problem to retrieve information about history and facts. Watson is having a hard time curing diseases because there are many aspects of human disease that have not been solved. It’s impossible to answer a question if the answer doesn’t exist yet.

So, here we are. To fully realize Star Trek’s vision of rapid expert diagnoses, we need to accelerate the pace that we grow new knowledge.

That’s where I come in, though I got here in a roundabout way. I began my academic career wanting to be an astronaut. I gravitated towards Environmental Engineering for a PhD with the idea of studying microbial ecology and biological networks. I had two internships at NASA’s Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers, but somehow my career aspirations for NASA started to fade. (I found out that I get horribly seasick, and the accident with the orbiter Columbia dealt the final blow.) After I graduated, I spent several years developing novel DNA sequencing technologies at the Stanford Genome Technology Center. This is where I was presented with a new challenge: help solve a medical mystery that was hurting one of my friends and stumping the experts. I made a radical career decision to tackle human disease using my training as an environmental engineer. After all, we are just biological networks with different packaging.

We need a “Lieutenant Commander Data” in our lives.  We need an expert problem solver, one that is able to make new connections and create new knowledge. We need to join forces to build it and to train it. This means breaking down barriers that prevent scientists from being more open and collaborative with each other. We need to forge partnerships with people who suffer from illness because they are the front line observers. We need to overcome the misaligned incentives of our medical system, and put the power into the hands of consumers that have a personal interest in the outcome. Finally, we need to understand that physicians are humans, and not necessarily the all-knowing beings that we expect them to be.

My colleagues and I are working to develop a new personal health advisor named Albright. Our inspiration comes from science fiction, but we expect you won’t have to wait until the 24th century to use it.