LiveScience.com - Bush Vetoes Stem Cell Bill As Promised
I have mixed feelings on the subject of "freedom". To be honest, I think real freedom is a myth, a convenient fiction that we use to tell ourselves that we really are in control of our lives, rather than being subject to the mechanics of our brains.
But of course freedom comes in many guises.
The American state was built around the concept of "freedom", specifically a kind of freedom sometimes called "civil liberty" - the right to do whatever you damn-well please as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.
Personally I think that's a bad idea... only a small percentage of the human species can be trusted with that kind of liberty, the rest will undoubtedly abuse it.
The freedom I'm talking about in the title of this post is the freedom to decide how long you will live.
Up till now, our life-spans have been dictated by, for the most part, natural factors: predators, disease, misfortune and old age. Predators haven't been a problem for some time, but the others remain. That's about to change.
Medical science is reaching a point where it will be so efficient that we will no longer be subject to those factors.
New research is bringing us ever closer to curing life-threatening diseases. On a regular basis, our understanding of cancer is improving, and we're not far off from knowing exactly how to stop it. I anticipate that within 20 years we'll start having some sort of "cancer vaccine" (along with vaccines for nasty viri like HIV, SARS and Ebola). It's just a matter of time.
Medical science is even getting closer to porviding solutions to old age and misfortune... we're only decades away from being able to replace damaged or faulty body parts with new ones grown from our own DNA.
There is one field of research that is central to these impending discoveries: stem cell research.
Why does it not surprise me in the least that the "Leader of the Free World (TM)" has vetoed a bill that would send that research forward in leaps and bounds. Even though Congress passed the bill with just shy of the two thirds majority they would need to override Dubya's veto, that goddam right-wing warmonger won't let the will of the people get in the way of him forcing his own conservative, religious fundamentalist, anti-science agenda down everybody's throats.
Fuck you, George W. Bush. Fuck you very much.
I agree with you fully.
ReplyDeleteAs harsh as it sounds, disease is nature’s way of culling the human population. If we were all totally healthy and died of old age we’d kill this world off with our sheer numbers very quickly. We’ll have to come up with a solution to this problem if we’re to abolish disease. At the same time a lot of the diseases have been caused by us and not by nature therefore it seems fair to me that we fix them.
For me the most important thing is this: They come from MY body therefore I should have the right to say what is to be done with them. NO-ONE should be allowed to override that. If I am a consenting adult with a sound mind I have the right to decide!
Indeed that's true.
ReplyDeleteThere are a number of possible solutions, all of which should be implemented, in my opinion.
Probably the gentlest way of doing it is through general education. Statisically, educated people have less children. This would take several generations to implement, but I reckon it would be effective. It has proven to be be effective in countries like Switzerland which has very high education and eployment rates, and a negative growth rate.
A more direct version of that is by implementing harsher population growth limits. This can start with a direct education campaign targeted at family planning, and then expanding to include mandatory sterilisations after a certain number of children (or at least strongly encouraged, enforced through tax penalties and the like). This has proven quite effective in places like China. This also takes a generation or two to take full effect, but it works, especially as an interim measure.
The third step is expansion and colonisation. We have the technology to start building settlements in previously ignored places: deserts, tundras and on the ocean floor. All we need is for some big rollers to put some money into it. I think that's just a matter of time.
We're also close as dammit to being able to start terraforming Mars and building colonies there as well as on the moon. Although NASA's lack of funding has forced them to put these projects pretty much on the backburner, I have no doubt that the new commercial interest in space-travel will inspire increased spending and then leaps forward in this respect.
Earth, indeed our solar system, are far too fragile baskets in which to keep all our eggs. We should start looking elsewhere to expand and colonise. There are bound to be thousands of planets out there where we could survive, and millions we could terraform.
But now I'm getting ahead of myself... I'm talking centuries into the future.