Post a response to this discussion thread
Gee, I've never been called a saint before! It gives me the urge to run out and do something nasty.
The Larry Niven story I was describing earlier had to do with taking organs from executed criminals. Medical science had advanced to the point that peoples' life spans were limited only be the supply of organs for donation. They therefore made more and more cimes punishable by execution, just to put more organs into the banks.
Didn't Cranky review a movie just recently in which a doctor was killing people for experiments?
The problem with this type of mad scientist story is: Where do these people expect to publish this data? Generally, these mad scientist types are motivated by fame and fortune. If they ever do discover something, what are they going to do? Write a letter to Nature or some other big journal saying "I've found a cure for cancer!"? Nature then replys "Okay, let's see the data." Then what? Nor can he just walk into a hospital and just start curing people. There's no way he'd be allowed to try an unknown treatment on people without having published a lot of preliminary data.
The same thing applies to the big drug companies. Even if they do unethical experiments, they can't get FDA approval to market the drug until they've done ethical ones. Even under sweatshop/mad scientist conditions, these types of experiments are just too expensive for them to waste resources on.
I hope this alleviates some of you're fears and suspicions.
Post a response to this discussion thread