On this 4th of July, while the flags are waving, I’m going to mull over this question:
Would $86 Billion have cured cancer?
On This 4th of July
On this 4th of July, while the flags are waving, I’m going to mull over this question:
Would $86 Billion have cured cancer?
Probably not..
At least not by itself..
Now if you paid it to doctors and scientists, maybe.
The sociology of science
As I’m getting older, I’m beginning to understand how the world actually works. In small, simple ways, really, nothing big. One of the thoughts I’m toying with is, perhaps, today’s inventors are what stands in the way of tomorrow’s inventions. There are many useful ideas which come out of scientific knowledge, constantly improving our way of life. But the really big, schema-changing stuff generally requires that the people who are used to the conventional way of doing things die off before the controversy surrounding the new idea goes away.
The “cure for cancer”, IMHO, is going to rely on mapping, understanding, and gaining the ability to modify the human genome. Human DNA has roughly three billion base pairs, and you carry two copies in every cell. The mutation of several of these 6 billion base pairs can cause the cell to become cancerous.
I think stem cell research can help us come up with ways of stabilizing rogue base pairs to reduce the likelihood of getting cancer. But my gut feeling is, since the controversy over stem cell research is happening today, that it will be at least 40 years before we can begin really exploiting today’s research.
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Matthew P. Barnson
In America, maybe
I think America is starting to become bogged down with the overhead that seems to accompany scientific development.
Meaning, I think other countries with less restrictive research environments will come up with a soltuion before we do. I understand the need for some checks and balances in R&D, but we also need to give the researches some room to work.
Because other countries definitely will. My $.02 Weed
Hmmm
I don’t know, but I imagine it would have made a large dent in the studies against.
Another question: Could $86 billion have made fuel cells viable in the US? Between infrastructure upgrades to provide it and R&D, I bet we could have moved a lot of people to hyrbud cars.
The most important thing to discover is a way to extract pure hydrogen cheaply.
My $.02 Weed