47 Future Now - Mobile Aloha Robot debuts, Peregrine Lander in Trouble, iPhone skydives 16K feet, Cool CES Gadgets, Transparent TV, CAR-T cancer treatment breakthrough

Listen Now to Future Now 1.9.24

It’s 2024 and time for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, a massive techie spectacle we used to attend every year.  These days, everything there is online and in many ways more accessible to braving the crowds in Las Vegas. New display tech was used to turned the famous Luxor pyramid hotel into a giant Dorito chip!  Is nothing sacred?  As we recorded this week’s show, CES had just opened and we discuss some of our favorite items from this year’s crop of shiny new gadgets.  But before we delve into CES world we look at Stanford/Google’s new robot, the Mobile Aloha, a machine that comes closer than ever to performing common household tasks well, like cooking and cleaning. And almost as amazing is the survival of an iPhone falling 16 thousand feet without a scratch. And even more incredible is a new CAR-T treatment for cancer worth checking out! Enjoy..

The Luxor pyramid is now a giant orange Dorito

Experimental, living T-cell therapy shows promise, making immunotherapy a ‘pillar’ of cancer care. We speak to Norm Lundell, currently undergoing such treatment.

Listen Now to Norm Lundell

When I read  a recent press release from the Hutch that twenty-seven out of 29 patients with an advanced blood cancer who received an experimental, “living” immunotherapy were experiencing sustained remissions, I took it personally as great news!  You see, my youngest brother, Norm, was one of those 27 patients, benefitting from this radical new treatment of cancer. 

Some of the patients in the trial, which began in 2013, were originally not expected to survive for more than a few months because their disease had previously relapsed or was resistant to other treatments.  So, our family was very worried about Norm.  He had just taken early retirement from Cisco and was looking forward to exploring life in new ways, then ‘wham!’ - time to think about cancer now! And he was not responding well to chemo.. 

In this segment, Norm shares with us his experiences with this new approach to cancer, a little about how it works, how he feels, and what the future of cancer therapy might be..