[extropy-chat] Financial Times on transhumanism: Themostdangerousidea on earth?

[Brett Paatsch]

The Avantguardian wrote:

> --- John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote:
>> I would also have to have to disagree with the
>> following statement:
>> 
>> "The astonishing advances in medicine over the past
>> 20 years."
>> 
>> The advances in understanding how biology works has
>> indeed been astonishing
>> but except for a few very rare diseases the
>> advancement in medicine has been
>> tiny over the last 20 years. The last true
>> breakthrough in medicine happened
>> more than 50 years ago with the invention of
>> Penicillin, nothing since has
>> come close.
> 
> You are forgetting: CAT,MRI, PET, vaccines for dozens
> of deadly diseases, whole new classes of drugs such as
> hormones for birth-control or growth, antivirals for
> HIV and herpes and phosphotase inhibitors like viagra
> , gene-therapy, advanced life support, the whole human
> genome, and resuscitation technology. Essentially, if
> you have been dead for less than ten minutes, we can
> bring you back. If you have been dead for longer, we
> can still bring your mindless-body back to life and
> keep it alive indefinately. 

Perhaps John sees means clinical medicine as opposed
to diagnostic tools and enabling technologies.

Which vaccines for deadly diseases did you have in
mind?

Which gene-therapies are available to clinicians?

I'm sceptical that its true as a generalisation that a person
dead for 9 minutes and 59 seconds or less can be brought
back. There would be some unusual circumstances where
that could indeed be true but they are unusual circumstances
of what is still 'heroic' medicine. 

And as for keeping the mindless-body alive indefinately,
that doesn't seem to be within the range of existing general 
clinical medical practice either. 

There is plenty of human condition yet to improved upon
and we have very much work still to do. 

Regards,
Brett Paatsch