Bruce Sterling - Essays. FSF Columns

the patient, and put the physician on surer ground with his diagnosis.

So why not just go ahead and take the test?

MRIs have gone ahead boldly. Unfortunately, miracles rarely

come cheap. Today the United States spends thirteen percent of its Gross

National Product on health care, and health insurance costs are

drastically outstripping the rate of inflation.

High-tech, high-cost resources such as MRIs generally go to to

the well-to-do and the well-insured. This practice has sad

repercussions. While some lives are saved by technological miracles --

and this is a fine thing -- other lives are lost, that might have been

rescued by fairly cheap and common public-health measures, such as

better nutrition, better sanitation, or better prenatal care. As advanced

nations go, the United States a rather low general life expectancy, and a

quite bad infant-death rate; conspicuously worse, for instance, than

Italy, Japan, Germany, France, and Canada.

MRI may be a true example of a technology genuinely ahead of

its time. It may be that the genius, grit, and determination of Raymond

Damadian brought into the 1980s a machine that might have been better

suited to the technical milieu of the 2010s. What MRI really requires for

everyday workability is some cheap, simple, durable, powerful

superconductors. Those are simply not available today, though they

would seem to be just over the technological horizon. In the meantime,

we have built thousands of magnetic windows into the body that will do

more or less what CAT-scan x-rays can do already. And though they do

it better, more safely, and more gently than x-rays can, they also do it

at a vastly higher price.

Damadian himself envisioned MRIs as a cheap mass-produced

technology. "In ten to fifteen years," he is quoted as saying in 1985,

"we'll be able to step into a booth -- they'll be in shopping malls or

department stores -- put a quarter in it, and in a minute it'll say you

need some Vitamin A, you have some bone disease over here, your blood

pressure is a touch high, and keep a watch on that cholesterol." A

thorough medical checkup for twenty-five cents in 1995! If one needed

proof that Raymond Damadian was a true visionary, one could find it

here.

Damadian even envisioned a truly advanced MRI machine

capable of not only detecting cancer, but of killing cancerous cells

outright. These machines would excite not hydrogen atoms, but

phosphorus atoms, common in cancer-damaged DNA. Damadian

speculated that certain Larmor frequencies in phosphorus might be

specific to cancerous tissue; if that were the case, then it might be

possible to pump enough energy into those phosphorus nuclei so that

they actually shivered loose from the cancer cell's DNA, destroying the

cancer cell's ability to function, and eventually killing it.

That's an amazing thought -- a science-fictional vision right out

of the Gernback Continuum. Step inside the booth -- drop a quarter --

and have your incipient cancer not only diagnosed, but painlessly

obliterated by invisible Magnetic Healing Rays.

Who the heck could believe a visionary scenario like that?

Some things are unbelievable until you see them with your own

eyes. Until the vision is sitting right there in front of you. Where it

can no longer be denied that they're possible.

A vision like the inside of your own brain, for instance.

This is the Golden Age of Glue.

For thousands of years, humanity got by with natural glues like

pitch, resin, wax, and blood; products of hoof and hide and treesap

and tar. But during the past century, and especially during the past

thirty years, there has been a silent revolution in adhesion.

This stealthy yet steady technological improvement has been

difficult to fully comprehend, for glue is a humble stuff, and the

better it works, the harder it is to notice. Nevertheless, much of the

basic character of our everyday environment is now due to advanced

adhesion chemistry.

Many popular artifacts from the pre-glue epoch look clunky

and almost Victorian today. These creations relied on bolts, nuts,

rivets, pins, staples, nails, screws, stitches, straps, bevels, knobs, and

bent flaps of tin. No more. The popular demand for consumer

objects ever lighter, smaller, cheaper, faster and sleeker has led to

great changes in the design of everyday things.

Glue determines much of the difference between our

grandparent's shoes, with their sturdy leather soles, elaborate

stitching, and cobbler's nails, and the eerie-looking modern jogging-

shoe with its laminated plastic soles, fabric uppers and sleek foam

inlays. Glue also makes much of the difference between the big

family radio cabinet of the 1940s and the sleek black hand-sized

clamshell of a modern Sony Walkman.

Glue holds this very magazine together. And if you happen to

be reading this article off a computer (as you well may), then you

are even more indebted to glue; modern microelectronic assembly

would be impossible without it.

Glue dominates the modern packaging industry. Glue also has

a strong presence in automobiles, aerospace, electronics, dentistry,

medicine, and household appliances of all kinds. Glue infiltrates

grocery bags, envelopes, books, magazines, labels, paper cups, and

cardboard boxes; there are five different kinds of glue in a common

filtered cigarette. Glue lurks invisibly in the structure of our

shelters, in ceramic tiling, carpets, counter tops, gutters, wall siding,

ceiling panels and floor linoleum. It's in furniture, cooking utensils,

and cosmetics. This galaxy of applications doesn't even count the

vast modern spooling mileage of adhesive tapes: package tape,

industrial tape, surgical tape, masking tape, electrical tape, duct tape,

plumbing tape, and much, much more.

Glue is a major industrial industry and has been growing at

twice the rate of GNP for many years, as adhesives leak and stick

into areas formerly dominated by other fasteners. Glues also create

new markets all their own, such as Post-it Notes (first premiered in

April 1980, and now omnipresent in over 350 varieties).

The global glue industry is estimated to produce about twelve

billion pounds of adhesives every year. Adhesion is a $13 billion

market in which every major national economy has a stake. The

adhesives industry has its own specialty magazines, such as

Adhesives Age andSAMPE Journal; its own trade groups, like the

Adhesives Manufacturers Association, The Adhesion Society, and the

Adhesives and Sealant Council; and its own seminars, workshops and

technical conferences. Adhesives corporations like 3M, National

Starch, Eastman Kodak, Sumitomo, and Henkel are among the world's

most potent technical industries.

Given all this, it's amazing how little is definitively known

about how glue actually works -- the actual science of adhesion.

There are quite good industrial rules-of-thumb for creating glues;

industrial technicians can now combine all kinds of arcane

ingredients to design glues with well-defined specifications:

qualities such as shear strength, green strength, tack, electrical

conductivity, transparency, and impact resistance. But when it

comes to actually describing why glue is sticky, it's a different

matter, and a far from simple one.

A good glue has low surface tension; it spreads rapidly and