21st Century Plague -- Part II
© Logan Hawkes
Biomedicine was born on the wake of technological and scientific breakthroughs of the 1980s. As less attention was being paid to defense technology, the more attention defense technology was paying to bio-tech engineering and its potential applications as both a weapon and a natural defense against other bio-tech weapons developed by opposing governments.
Such broad scientific interest, combined with healthy research budgets, advanced this discipline of science enormously in a short period of time. Today, biomedicine represents a huge segment of widespread scientific research, and annually produces new and often useful medicines and products for society. In recent years alone, the science has given the world hi-tech antibiotics and vaccines; tiny bacterial pathogens designed to clean up oil spills; genetic codes that make fruits and vegetables resistant to insects and infections; and a dozen or more other useful micro-products designed to better life in the 21st century.
History will prove that it is not always the "bad guys" that rain tragedy down upon our society-at-large. A case in point, when Henry Ford started mass producing and marketing the first real commercial vehicles of our time, little did he know the automobile would become the number one killer of modern times. He had no way of knowing there were environmental concerns associated with carbon-fuel combustion engines, or that the demand for raw rubber used in the manufacture of tires would cause the enslavement and near-genocide of Maya Indians in Guatemala.
Sigmund Freud had no way of knowing when he presented his oratory to the medical society that his famous "seven-percent solution" (that increased human stamina and productivity in a clinical examination) would end with clinical addiction to cocaine, resulting in death for every single long-term test subject.
Could Robert Goddard have known that his developing technology would one day provide the ability to deliver an intercontinental ballistic war head half way across the world, with the potential of destroying millions of lives with a single blow?
Dr. Jonas Salk, Eli Whitney, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and hundreds of others may have been guilty of either directly or indirectly launching a host of new problems on society, all in an effort to better that same society, and the quality of life among it.
Not that their great discoveries and inventions haven't positively affected society as well. But the catch 22 of progress and development has always been the good comes with the bad; or the other way around. For every action there is a reaction (to borrow from science). With discovery comes the chance for accidental tragedy; the unlocking of unknown threats.
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