Question: Is there a gap between diagnosis and treatment?
Transcript: Well there’s two gaps there. One is a gap between our ability to diagnose and cure, and there’s other cases where they have the ability to cure but not diagnose the small set of people who react very negatively. Both of these, I think, are going to see major progress. They’ve already seen some major progress. But for example, different people have different responses to a personal decision. If you are offered the ability to get diagnosed for a disease for which there is no cure, some people say, “I don’t want to know that”. Other people say, “I want to know that, but I’m not going to do anything about it.” And the third set say, “Oh we’re gonna embrace this. We’re going to become experts on this disease,” even though they’re not even scientists. They become experts. Think of Lorenzo’s Oil where Augusto Odone actually starts to learn biochemistry and himself makes a contribution to lipid disorders . . . makes a new drug-like, food-like molecule. But there are many cases of this where people become the poster . . . . their family will become poster children for the disease: Michael J. Fox for Parkinson’s, and Doug Melton for Diabetes, and Betty Ford for cancer and substance abuse, and so forth. So I think that’s a really big opportunity is to take ownership of all the things that are special about your family, both positive and negative, and link up with other families that have the same alleles, the same changes in their DNA, the same variations that make them different from the average, and see how it plays out differently in different families. Maybe that some of them have much more severe traits than others, and you can find it by sharing that information. And you can see what lifestyle changes might be correlated with a less severe outcome. So I think that embracing things that don’t have cures, whether they’re severe or not, is an opportunity that we’ll see more and more.
Discuss
Orlando Pagan on January 16, 2008, 5:14 PM
Good on the Part that talk about working together technolog, humans and man made machines, we could acomplish high Goal, like Life Extension.
Orlando Pagan on January 16, 2008, 10:14 PM
Good on the Part that talk about working together technolog, humans and man made machines, we could acomplish high Goal, like Life Extension.
Andres Colon on February 8, 2008, 2:40 AM
Death sucks. We want to live forever.
To learn more about life extension see:
http://www.thoughtware.tv/videos/show/554
http://www.thoughtware.tv/videos/show/550
Andres Colon on February 8, 2008, 7:40 AM
Death sucks. We want to live forever.
To learn more about life extension see:
http://www.thoughtware.tv/videos/show/554
http://www.thoughtware.tv/videos/show/550
Denis Drew on December 18, 2008, 3:04 PM
As much as I thought I was aware of the poor state of unions in the USA I was surprised to read in the last chapter of Thomas Geoghegan’s book, Which Side Are You On, that blocking unionization is a simple, standardized process, performed by hired hands who get away with breaking the law (the core of the blocking process) — automatically.
At any whisper of a certification campaign by employees and management simply fires the leaders (never more than 1, or at most 2, out of 20). Said leaders then automatically file for reinstatement which is automatically granted them — 4 years later! — with back pay which is automatically granted — minus any wages they earned anywhere else! — after which 80% are fired again — for “legal” reasons this time! — within a year.
IOW, there is no effective right to organize labor under US law — only the right to ask for your employer’s permission to organize.
I would argue that the current legally prescribed labor organizing process violates the First Amendment right to assembly.
This is tricky. Commercial speech is protected but less so than political speech (e.g., advertising)? I can see the right to organize for the purpose of wage bargaining as as being recognized as protected commercial assembly (would be a new concept) which is protected even if less so than political assembly.
This gets trickier. The current legally prescribed organizing process does not directly prohibit organizing — but steers all organizing activity into a narrow channel which is impossible to navigate against simple, standardized technique practiced by the opposite commercial interest.
It is not as if labor has any other forum or venue in which to pursue organzing. The law prescribes ONE path and one path only — and it is IMPOSSIBLE to negotiate said path if the opposite interest desires not.
Lee Bob Black on August 18, 2009, 10:30 AM
Steven Pinker and and George Church on a NOVA scienceNOW segment, Public Genomes; http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0406/01.html
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