Charles M. Lieber and Shaun Patel, a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, see a field — their own — at a tipping point. In a perspective titled “Precision Electronic Medicine,” published this month in Nature Biotechnology, they argue that neurotechnology is on the cusp of a major renaissance.
“The next frontier is really the merging of human cognition with machines,” said Patel, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. And in their article, he and Lieber, the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, write that mesh electronics such as those developed by Lieber are the foundation for machines designed to personalize electronic treatment for just about anything related to the brain.
“Everything manifests in the brain fundamentally. Everything. All your thoughts, your perceptions, any type of disease,” Patel said.
