Maybe we need to look at fighting viruses and cancer in a different way. I am neither a virologist or oncologist—heck, I didn’t even sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but it appears to me the strategy in fighting these aliens seems to focus on blocking the payloads from entering and infecting healthy cells.  That makes sense.

The image is what is called a Necker Cube– an optical illusion, devised by Swiss crystallographer Lewis Albert Necker (10 April 1786 – 20 November 1861). If you stare at this cube, it may appear in one instant as having a front surface pointing toward the upper right and in a flash may appear that the front surface is pointing to the lower left– both images absolutely correct.

When I first came upon this concept back in the late ‘70s, I drafted it into a personal directive; that every problem has at least two correct solutions. This simple directive led to my ability as a problem solver.  My expertise was in enterprise monitoring of networks, routers, switches, servers and applications.  The motto most adopted was to be proactive.  The Necker cube approach led me to realize there is no such a thing as being proactive (prediction based). For example: I could never predict that ConEd might dig up the sidewalk outside our data center and accidentally cut through some fiber, severing the path between resource and use.  My approach was to hope to react faster than the effects of that cut fiber being felt by those using the resources now off-line. Without getting into the minutiae of lots of coding to interpret SNMP remote monitoring agents and what was going on in the OSI protocol stack, the model I adopted was much more scalable than trying to predict every possible disaster and then drafting into place a disaster recovery plan for each disaster–– which is like chasing lighting and becomes dated the minute it is put into place.

So applying the Necker Cube approach for treating viruses and cancers, think about what the purpose is of viruses and cancers for a minute.  One view might be that their purpose is to replicate; to pass on the genetic code of their blueprint, uncaring of the detrimental effects to the host; the pure selfishness of replication and being perfect at doing so. 

So applying the Necker Cube approach, a novel one indeed, one might be to give the virus or cancer what it needs: a healthy medium in which to replicate.  Feed it instead of trying to starve it.  How this might be done is surely not my expertise, but maybe some free floating magnetic nano cells that hold up a welcome sign and when there remains no more vacancy in these nano-cells, they are herded out of the host and a fresh set of nano-cells are introduced.

• It’s why I write Sci-Fi and so far from what I have seen, Science Fiction is waiting for fact to catch up to it…. “And fact waits for regulation,” as someone (@EduGonzalezL) on my twitter stream once cleverly replied.