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Historical April–May 2022 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
We will soon know it all. Sure, that’s an audacious claim.
I mean, all statements that include “all” are false, including this one.
But there’s a lot of truth to it.
Please inhale, because our scientific knowledge is advancing at a breathtaking clip. Just the other day I read about tiny ingestible pills that contain a camera. Yep, you gulp and then videos of your entire digestive tract are sent to your physician.
I am not making this up! Check out the Mayo Clinic’s article on capsule endoscopies: https://www. mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/ capsule-endoscopy/about/pac- 20393366. And while the Mayo folks didn’t tout this in their article, inside sources (no pun intended) tell me that the pill is bluetooth connected to Spotify so you can be rhythmically moving and jiving throughout the day. Personally, I am going to ask that my ingestible capsule be linked to NPR so I will seem knowledgeable.
I can hope. Scientists at our neighbor, Washington University in St. Louis, thank goodness, are working to develop treatments for Alzheimer’s, and that’s another thank goodness. See https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/new-alzheimers-treatment-targets-identified/. They’ve also just created a screening tool to determine if young people are at risk of schizophrenia (https://source.wustl.edu/2022/03/risk-of-schizophrenia-assessed-with-new-screening-tool/). Progress is bursting all around us! Of course, as we pitch our KN95 masks, we cannot forget the rapid development of Covid vaccines.
To be fair, former president Trump deserves credit for creating Operation Warp Speed. Even a blind presidential squirrel occasionally finds a nut. Continuing to be fair, it’s too bad that he pushed back against common sense safety measures that would have reduced Covid deaths. At the other end of the life continuum, we are learning more and more about the composition of our genetic make-up. Did you know that we each have around 20,000 genes? See https://www. nature.com/articles/d41586- 018-05462-w. No wonder Levi Strauss & Co. stock does so well. (Get it?) With that DNA knowledge comes the temptation to tinker; that’s a technical term meaning edit, modify, play with, or roll the dice. Indeed, The Guardian published an article, “Designer Babies: an Ethical Horror Waiting to Happen” (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/08/designer-babies-ethical-horror-waiting-to-happen). That title means you can skip reading the article, just pour yourself another gin & tonic. Let’s hope that our leaders use better judgment here than they did in displacing Native Americans, allowing slavery, forbidding women to vote, supporting pollution-generating automobiles, and letting the St. Louis Hawks move to Atlanta.
These kinds of breathtaking medical advances are especially relevant to me because I’m older than I used to be. OK, that’s true for all of us, so let me rephrase: Despite my youthful appearance, I am much older than I used to be.
I mean, I’ve been writing this In Your Ear column since 1980, before many of you readers were alive (and trust me, the columns before your birth were nothing short of sensational!). So, it floats my boat when I read about inventions that offer immunity against diseases, retard aging, and eliminate mental decline.
But despite this encouraging prospectus, the reality is that our knowing it all, or at least semi-all, is confined to scientific knowledge, the math/science areas that were particularly challenging in school for Hawkeye. It’s good that scientific breakthroughs will enable us to live longer, better, and stronger, but what about the environment in which we’ll be spending those additional scores of years?
The outlook here isn’t rosy at all. Consider global warming. It’s happening folks, so don’t buy near a coastline, don’t plan on being cool in the summer and don’t throw away your snow shovel. Unfortunately, while the term “global warming” is accurate, it makes it harder for people to understand the many negative ways we are affected.
We wise people – those of us who swallowed the ingestible capsule that is linked to NPR – know that global warming not only raises seas, it also contributes to more severe winters, summer fires, and hurricanes. Too bad that the impact of the global temperature increase wasn’t termed “weather catastrophes.” Maybe we need to plan to live longer on a mountain top. Of course, our environment isn’t just the physical world. There’s our political environment and the prospects aren’t much better here.
I just read a terrific book that I highly recommend, Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, that offers lots of data about the increased divisions between Republicans and Democrats. Here’s a particularly distressing comment: “… there is a growing urban-rural divide.
There is no dense city in America that routinely votes Republican.
There are few rural areas that vote Democratic.” He continues, “… the dividing line is at about nine hundred people per square mile; above that, areas trend Democratic; below it, they
turn Republican” (p. 39).
The distressing implications of this vis-à-vis the Electoral College mean it will be harder and harder to elect a Democratic president. (Of course, if you’re a rare Republican reader, you may be smiling.) When you consider global warming, the impact that Covid had and will continue to have, our political divide, and the pernicious behaviors of the Republican Party (yeah, let’s ignore all the evidence and say Trump won the election), it’s pretty discouraging. Our extended lives will be in an unhealthy environment, like going to an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord with terrible food. How to respond? Well, I try to follow the Serenity Prayer, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Please pass me a glazed donut and an OPRAH FOR PRESIDENT bumper sticker.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, April–May 2022.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2022_04.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
