Now that’s funny
Friday, August 1st, 2008 By Mike Maurer
Some stories are treated as a joke, and this is a common one: “Exercise in a pill“.
It’s a serious enough scientific study, and it’s easy enough to see why an editor would find such a story appealing. And of course there’s the obligatory ending: “For the majority of people, it would be better to do exercise than to take a pill.”
That last seems an unsupported assertion. If the issue is a given condition of a physical body, let’s say percentage body fat, but it could be anything, then what difference does it make how it’s achieved, all things equal? It’d be a question of cost, including opportunity cost, and that could go several directions.
What is really underlying all of this is mankind’s increasing ability to control the cellular and molecular world. We’re having a lot of debates about a lot of important things, including health care, health care costs, insurance and welfare to pay those costs, but the reality is that the assumptions and knowledge necessary to those debates is changing all the time.
I’m thinking that it won’t be all that far into the future when we’ll be looking at today’s chemistry and pharmacology with the same eye that today we look at Civil War medical instruments.
Tags: nanotechnology
