About
The goal of the RCTS is to develop a portfolio of specific technologies in three areas that are long and widely appreciated as critical and which proved thus in our analyses of the broader issues behind the medical incentive and insulin supply chain failures that Open Insulin, another project founded by Anthony Di Franco, exists to address, but will not address directly. Practical solutions to the limiting technical issues exist in well-vetted research, but the economic incentives to fully reduce them to practice do not exist within existing institutions, thus our plan to organize a late-stage R&D / tech-transfer-focused and selective-scope version thereof. The three focus areas are as follows.
The first area is small scale energy and transportation technology that is simple to manufacture and maintain with a minimum of reliance on rare materials. Of obvious importance in an age of deterioration of geopolitical conditions for trade and increasing economic volatility and resource scarcity, we also found overcentralized transportation networks built under development agendas that were indifferent to most of the populations they purported to serve contributed much to cutting off about half the world’s population from insulin, and by straightforward inference quite a lot of other goods and opportunities. We have identified a suite of technologies for development comprising 1) torque dense electric machines that do not require permanent magnets and minimize copper use, 2) high efficiency and low complexity internal and external combustion engine designs with modular parts of simple manufacture having mostly extruded 2-dimensional geometry, and 3) applications of these to design of refrigeration systems, household and workshop scale energy and climate systems, and small vehicles, all suitable for manufacture, operation, and maintenance in remote and infrastructure-light areas.
The second area is making gene therapy practical, in particular for diabetes. We have a solid high level strategy for what genetic modifications to make in what tissues to cure diabetes of all types and address a host of related metabolic disease issues, and a viable delivery vehicle, and are preparing to proceed to experimental work.
The third area is information and communication technology, viewed as the base of both social ties and materially productive technology. We have a design for a purely declarative software system that promises to tame the combinatorial scaling of complexity of software development with respect to complexity of desired system behavior and thus bring much more authorship and stewardship of software within reach of individuals and small groups, and facilitate reverse engineering and repurposing of existing systems and equipment.