dlowan wrote:Lol - or would you call that engineering???
How about calling it Public Health? We are a social species and what effects the majority ultimately effects all.
georgeob1 wrote:dlowan wrote:Lol - or would you call that engineering???
Ok - smallpox vaccine alone.
Good points on both counts. Perhaps I should have said science hasn't made the experience of life any better for those who live relatively well.
I cannot imagine what you can mean.
Smallpox was endemic in the world for rich and poor alike until the vaccine, as were polio, death in childbirth and on and on and on - to mention a squillionth of science's contributions in health alone!
If we look at other areas, well....
Life expectency today in Zimbabwe is 31, in Africa as a whole, about 45. In second century Rome life expectency is estimated at about 50, and if you survived childhood diseases about 60. Seneca died at age 77, Cicero at 61 (executed by Octavian). Diseases were spread a bit less quickly in the lower density populations of the time, and the Romans had a better water supply than did later Medieval and even 17th cewntrury cities.
It has not been, by any means, onward and upward in history.
Science magazine special on the two candidates and science:
http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/candidates2004/
