Medical Breakthroughs And Smart Policy

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

3/23/13

 

Got a bad heart? Just have a scientist build you a new one. According to a story in the WSJ, scientists are making major breakthroughs in artificially growing replacement organs out of human cells. In 2011, for example, a London based researcher made a replacement windpipe for a cancer patient, and was able to save the patient’s life by installing it. There’s still a lot of obstacles to overcome in scaling up this kind of procedure and expanding it to different organs, but based on earlier experiments with rats, scientists now think they might be close to making a replacement human heart:

 

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The piece goes through the current state of this science in depth. Read the whole thing to get a sense of how radically human life is going to change in the next decades.

 

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As the biotech revolution moves on, we are also going to have to change the way the health care system distributes health care. As computer aided diagnosis improves, nurses, technicians and even parents and patients (gasp!) are going to be able to make better informed decisions without doctors. Much of the creaky, elaborate and expensive health care delivery system we have today could be as useless in a generation as the Postal Service is today in the age of email.

 

The combination of rapid change with rigid policies and institutions is a recipe for disaster; we must embed flexibility into our institutions. Keeping an eye on the radical changes coming down the pipe is one way to remind ourselves that the goal of social policy today must be to plan for and accommodate change. The age of static institutions and stable bureaucratic organizations has gone for good, and we have to figure out what comes next.

 

 

 

Cross Posted at Hinge Of History