Stem cells are revolutionizing medicine. No question–the things they can do are getting closer and closer to what we, with our limited understanding of how the universe really works, have always called miracles. Now, even Business Week is trumpeting the ascendancy of bioscience–the article even has a cool interactive heart graphic!

If we are to believe how simple it can be, you’d think that by 2010 (a mere 5 years away), a medical specialist called, say, a “stem cell expert” will know how to extract them and how to inject them, and s/he will be an expert at healing all kinds of body parts. Of course,we still have to find all the places to use them to heal the various diseases, but that seems like less a puzzle than the way we’ve had to approach it in the past.

The speed at which discoveries are being made makes many things incomprehensible to most of us–but recovering more easily, enduring less pain, getting healed naturally–those things we can “get.” Drugs that don’t destroy more than they fix are becoming the norm. Technology will play new roles–as it allows ever smaller and less intrusive mechanisms, it can be used more and more to help, for example, movement disorders. Computers will help with brain problems, etc., etc.

What a time to be alive.