Modern day Menlow Park
Dakota Hamill
Andreas Stuermer
Andreas Stuermer
You're still bound to all the laws. You would really have to found a new nation like micronations so you could do anything you want and set up our own ethics senate
Andreas Stuermer
Think of contergan (not sure if US guys know it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide ).
Also if it disrupts the hormone levels of women and alters partner choice, it doesn't cause pain directly so 99% of population just don't care
I’m totally in for micronations. We should realize the plastic island idea of phillip boeing and team :D
http://2012.igem.org/Team:University_College_London
also compare http://anno2070.wikia.com/wiki/Techs for inspiration.
no seriously: in my eyes, universities could and should be the thing that we are looking for,
but due to some unfortunate development, they became an addendum to for profit corporations,
selling out the intellectual capacity of the academic workers for peanuts.
In most cases I know, the inventor had no influence on the sale of his idea by the uni and did not even get much money out.
even worse, often extremely good ideas are sold to big pharma and then locked away, just to protect less advanced products
on the market from competitors. Universities are stuck with a feudalistic organizational model (at least in germany)
with a professors being the pharaoh like masters and the rest only exchangeable minions without any rights.
In the end, only a few egocentric professors and some managers of these big companies really profit from all the inventions.
neither society has a big influence on what is being made into a product (at best indirectly through consumers choice),
nor the people in academia that do all the labour see much rewards for the things that become successful (think of Mullis).
With 50% of the youngsters in Germany going through uni today, it seems like the academics (once a priviledged class)
are the new workers. So now it’s the question if universities can be reformed (many tried and failed)
or if some new structures are easier to realize. or if it’s all totally pointless…
Recently, I had the chance to talk to Carl Djerassi, the inventor of “the pill”.
He told me straight away to give up my ideas on improving contraception methods.
In his eyes( the man is 93) the capitalist pharma world is in a dead end and nothing is going to change within the next 30 years until a significant
people are going to suffer (and die) so badly again, that even this monolithic structure will see enough (financial) incentive to change its ways.
I find this prospect quite horrible. We have such an unprecedented amount of knowledge and technology at hand, with a very high percentage of the
population educated to make use of it. It will not even be very expensive to find solutions compared to the collateral costs when doing nothing
and waiting until people suffer and die. So why on earth is nothing happening to make use of this potential to really solve problems that everybody is facing (e.g. antibiotic crisis)?