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Spreading good ideas with someone you know is one of the simplest things we can do to improve the conversation.

• Amit Ron replied on 08:59 AM on January 28, 2008
  one needs to remember that most of the world's population still don't have access to basic living conditions and this is something we have got to change.
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• Amit Ron replied on 01:59 PM on January 28, 2008
  one needs to remember that most of the world's population still don't have
  access to basic living conditions and this is something we have got to change.
  
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Ezekiel Emanuel Puts Technology in Perspective

Ezekiel Emanuel Bioethicist, National Institutes of Health

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Ezekiel Emanuel: I read a recent statistic which just blew my mind away; that today, the average American has 10 times as much material resources as the American . . . that Americans had in the Civil War, which is just a phenomenal thing when you consider it. And it’s all because of technological . . . scientific and technological advances. And the ability to harness energy, the ability to transform energy . . . just phenomenal driver in society. And again, both positive and . . . You know, we have better killing machines too. And so both of those things are, I think, phenomenally important. And you know, we didn’t have much progress in terms of improvement in living standards for millennia until really the developments in the 16th, 17th century of science, and the ability to transform science into technology. And sometimes I think we don’t appreciate the flushed toilet enough. You know, it’s just . . . indoor plumbing, indoor heating. I – in the late 1970s and early 80s – lived in Oxford in rooms that had no central heating. We had a heating coil. And I think you get to appreciate central heating – and the fact that you can actually live at 70 degrees all year around – a lot more when you are freezing and you can’t actually get to sleep because you are shivering so much. And I think that’s just a phenomenal thing to take for granted in our society. And it’s been a very short time since that’s been possible.

Recorded on: 7/5/07

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Ezekiel Emanuel Bioethicist, National Institutes of Health

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Ezekiel Emanuel is the Chair of the Department of Bioethics at the Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Emanuel is a well-known authority on the ethics of clinical research, end of life care issues, euthanasia and the ethics of managed care.

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