Science offers the chance to cure debilitating and once-intractable disorders like hemophilia and sickle cell disease. But we need to make sure the ability to access these therapies, or the risk that someone can be locked out of them, doesn't widen gaps between the rich and poor.
Interpretation
Scientific advancements bring hope for curing diseases, but access must be equitable to avoid increasing inequality.
This quote emphasizes the potential of science to develop treatments for serious health conditions like hemophilia and sickle cell disease. However, it warns that without careful consideration and equitable access to these medical breakthroughs, disparities between different socioeconomic groups may grow, leading to increased inequality in health and wellbeing.
In practice
In a public health seminar discussing equitable access to healthcare advancements.
It is true that some off-label drug use is based on very unsettled science and has more risks. But medicine - and not just cancer care - involves lots of hard choices. And the more serious the disorder, often the more likely it is that for every right and wrong treatment choice there are many other practical decisions painted in shades of gray.
In fast moving fields like cancer, where doctors tailor treatments based on evidence that's constantly evolving, two years can be an eternity of waiting to learn about important science. For some patients, that interval can be fatal.
We need to make sure that access to a curative drug doesn't become a yardstick by which poverty is eventually measured. Doing so requires a shared commitment between innovators and the insurance plans that are harder pressed to offer these advances to the poor.
Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
We often say that our science is objective and accurate, but we don't often say that our science is incomplete - that although the established parts of natural science are very well tested and the evidence makes a compelling case for things being as they've been described, there nevertheless are open questions that we cannot answer.
If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.
Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.
I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.
Let us not fool ourselves into thinking we went to the Moon because we are pioneers, or discoverers, or adventurers. We went to the Moon because it was the militaristically expedient thing to do.
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