[ExI] Stem cell breakthrough

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 11:53 AM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 7:13 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
> > the stretch between "awesome in the lab" to "in a clinic near you" is
>> very long.
>>
>
> Boy is that ever true! We know astronomically more biology than we did in
> 1960, but medicine has advanced only very very slightly in all that time.
> The biggest "recent" advance in medicine, antibiotics,  happened over 50
> years ago, and improved sanitation and anesthesia over a century ago. After
> that it's mostly been a few slight tweaks here and there. Very
> disappointing.
>

I wonder how much of this is the science, and how much can be blamed on the
bureaucracy, or the expense of anticipating bureaucracy to be traversed?

If the government ever does get full control of health care, will that mean
that since they can't be sued for messing up that we may see more daring
medicine? Or will it mean ever slower delivery of new medical
breakthroughs? Only time will tell, but I'll bet on freedom every time.

-Kelly
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20140203/791dc6c0/attachment.html>