From: Don Klemencic (klemencc@sgi.net)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2000 - 18:39:54 MST
Arla,
The attachment called "The lowest form of human life" reminds me of
something I wrote once. I read that when Edward Jenner introduced
vaccination to prevent smallpox, he was condemned from the pulpits of
Christendom for interfering with the will of God. I was angry about that for
some time, feelings similar to my response to the jackasses quoted in this
attachment. Finally I sat down to write what I felt and this poem wrote
itself:
An Open Letter to Prometheus
We both know
You and the snake got a raw deal.
Contrary to common opinion,
Zeus and Yahweh are not responsible:
We both know
Those two don't exist,
except in the fear of the snivelers.
They did it-
The worst in man,
The cowards,
Condemned the best:
You and the Snake.
Your gift,
The Fire of Thought,
They call Hubris-Pride
-and pretend it's evil.
His gift,
The Fruit of the Tree
Of Knowledge of Good and Evil,
They call sin-
Original Sin.
They say:
"That's Unnatural."
"That's Tampering with Nature."
"It's the Will of God."
"Suffering is Noble."
"Have Faith."
"Be Humble."
"Accept."
They won't admit that You Are Man
Because they're afraid
to become God.
That last line seems to generate more heat than light so I've sometimes used
the alternate ending:
To stand on their feet,
And use their Minds
And use their Hands.
But I like the original ending. It has more punch.
Don Klemencic
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-extropians@extropy.com [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.com] On
Behalf Of Arla Johnson
Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 4:15 AM
To: kdurst@compuserve.com; kjohnson@sk.sympatico.ca; extropians@extropy.com;
transhuman@logrus.org
Subject: [Fwd: The lowest form of human life]threshold value to sustain a
quality adjusted year of life
<< Message: The lowest form of human life (1.82 KB) >> Ditto.
The thinking which has driven digital technology to satisfy moore's law
to create "faster, better, cheaper" for the consumer has created a
massive consolidation of economic resources based upon
physical assets which are essentially nearly worthless in a traditional
economic sense.
Medicine is still based upon assumptions that disease and death are
inevitable and rewards to the economic engine are to be based upon
keeping societal medical costs to less than $830,000 per first world
citizen. A paridigm shift which would give medical economists and
ethicists some grief would be a public mandated requirement to
apply moore's law to medical economics.
To be both cost effective and ethical , medicine has to fully
commercialize medical knowledge in extremely short time slices.
Developments which had product life cycles starting with extremely
expensive procedures or medical products used by a handful and ending
in cheap procedures/products utilized by anyone with even marginal
resources and a desire to access a procedure/product traditionally took
decades to reach full worldwide commercialization. Digital technology
is the key to making moore's law applicable to medicine.
The cost to generate the code underlying a windows 2000 program is only
justified if there are a hundred million users in less than 3 years
willing to fork out $100 each for the end product. The key to making
medical economics ethical is to deliver drugs, procedures similarly.
Doctors are to be advisors and the patient the ones to satisfy.
The need to mate the trillion in internet market capitalization with a
trillion in real world business
(ex the AOL -Time Warner merger) might just be the spark to start a
medical economics and ethics paridigm shift.
Anyway it's 3 AM here so I will have to leave these thoughts for another
day.
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