Hi-Tech Medicine Of Tomorrow

Hi-tech is on the verge of bringing medicine to a higher level, as scientists work on artificial muscles, lungs and kidneys, and a perfectly safe way to tan, among many other projects.

The latest issue of Popular Science magazine

The magazine's executive editor, Michael Moyer, tells The Early Show co-anchor Hannah Storm, "The stuff that they're working on is amazing. They're working on artificial retinas to help the blind see and pills to make you smarter."

Artificial muscle, says Moyer, is "basically plastic that can move, that can contract, that can do everything we want muscle to do. This would allow us to have mechanical devices with no moving parts. Right now, one company is working on artificial muscle that would contract your eyeball, actually, to correct near-sightedness.

Artificial muscle has implications for the heart, as well.

Researchers are also "working on artificial lungs, which would actually be implanted in your body, to help you breathe," Moyer says. "One of the great things they're doing is having an artificial kidney where, like a dialysis machine, it would clean your blood. However, it would put all the nutrients back into your blood as well, which is what dialysis machines take out now."

The concept of an "online medicine cabinet" is also advancing.

"It's a fun thing that should be coming out within in a few years," Moyer says. "It basically brings the diagnostic functions of your doctor's office back into your home. It will be able to take your pulse, do your heart rate, take your blood pressure and then connect to the Internet so you would be able to send that information to your doctor or track it through time.

"It would be able to detect you and see who you are when you approach the medicine cabinet, know if you're sensitive to a certain pollen count and warn you if you are.

"It would also tell you if you are taking the right medication out of the cabinet and then, when you run low, it will reorder it automatically for you."

Moyer says a biotech company in California is working on "this really amazing device where it uses a burst of nitrogen, compressed nitrogen, and it bursts and opens up a little pore in your skin, then sends … medicine … directly in without an injection. It feels like a little flick. You feel it, but it's certainly a lot better than a shot."

An Australian company has, in trials, implanted a small device that has raised the levels of melanin in people's bodies, enabling them get a natural tan with no UV radiation. "It's perfectly safe," Moyer says.

Overall, the technology described in the magazine isn't ready for primetime yet, but innovations such as the needle-free injection may be available within a year. Others, like the online medicine cabinet, are probably a few years off. Artificial muscles and other replacement organs require further development and rigorous trials and probably won't be available for decades.