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Anyway, other than that I thought I'd briefly mention a couple interesting stories from the Guardian about various forms of “out there” research in China like elective brain-frying to cure addiction and injecting stem cells to cure ALS and lots more. You may not be sold on the science (personally I think that last week's report of South Korea having a paralyzed woman walk after stem cell injections is quite likely quackery), but the commentary on the differences in medical ethics is fascinating. A few quotes from the articles:
Complicating the debate is Huang's lack of statistical data and and his refusal to carry out the double-blind trials considered necessary in western circles to rule out the placebo effect. The Chinese neurosurgeon says such tests are unethical because they involve cutting someone open and only pretending to treat them. "This would not be legal in China," he says. "Even if it was, I wouldn't do it. Double-blind trials only harm the patient."
The surgery will provide more ammunition to critics who claim a lack of control over bioethics has turned China into the "wild east" of biology ... The Shanghai brain surgeons are not the only scientists in the city, or in China, to find themselves at odds with the social and ethical views of the west. Stem cell research using embryos, field trials of GM crops and neuroscience experiments on monkeys have all pushed ahead.
The boast that China leads the world in this area of medical science would have been unbelievable a few years ago, but lower ethical barriers have allowed doctors here to conduct experiments not permitted elsewhere. "Chinese doctors have mixed many kinds of cells," says Huang. "Some things are legal in China that are not legal in the US."
I have no idea if this is going to solidy China's future as a world leader (or a trans-species leader as we become homo superior), or if it's going to end life for all of us, but like Arthur C. Clarke always said, the reason the dinosaurs went extinct is because they didn't have a space program. Well, fact is that you can't really have the kind of space program that “insures” you against planet-destroying events without heavy duty transhuman technology as well.
In any case, it's a better story than what's in the papers here… Drug companies fighting to legislate themselves into higher and higher profits, and (I kid you not) debating whether they need a new line of more expensive and more powerful scanning devices since current ultrasound and x-ray machines are not entirely able to see through the layers of fat which surround many American bodies. While you think about that, let me remind you that in the time it took you to read this entry (I'm guessing a minute and change), twenty people died of hunger-related causes — one every four seconds.
It's not that we have too little food and resources, it's just that we suck at sharing.
Finally, I've written here before about “the system” being the problem (rather than specific evil overlords), sort of like in the movie “Cube” (which is a better description of how corporations work than anything else I've seen). Anyway, Max over at KarmabanQue came up with the idea of using Coke shares to profit from a boycott of Coke (by buying, boycotting, short-selling, and then investing the profits in efforts to stop Coke's reign of terror). There's more info on the how and why in this article and this PDF.
It reminds me of another “playing the system against itself” trick that I think I saw someone mention in a Fark threat recently. You know how the more debt looms, the easier it can be to get loans and credit cards, which of course drives you deeper and deeper into debt slavery (until you hit the “financially dead for sure” threshhold that is)? Well, the idea is that if you know you're probably going to go bankrupt, but you still have access to loans at good rates, you borrow as much money as you can ($100k, $250k, more?) and put it into high payoff but high risk investments… which means that at the end of that year, either you're bankrupt (which you likely would have been anyway), or you're very wealthy.
I doubt it's a very good idea, but at least it's got a certain comédie de désespoir to it.
