Week 8 - Innovation in Technoloy, the Road to Solutions?

After spending seven weeks discussing the major health issues of the world, it is a breath of fresh air to begin really discussing potential solutions. All of the presentations discussed technologies for improvement in biomedical sciences affecting many areas of life, and it was impressive to hear about the ideas that improved communication, access to care, and delivery of aid. Many of these inventions seem like no-brainers, but when I was listening to Farah's presentation and she mentioned one of the con's of Genetically Modified Crops it dawned on me that we really haven't touched much on the topic of ethics and whether we should be using these technologies. This has also come up in my research for my paper on the Implications of Intellectual Property Rights on Public Health. We are always asking questions to find solutions to problems: what is the problem, how can we address it, what is the best way, who is involved?? But we rarely ask: what are the implications for the future and how will this affect our environment on all levels?? These are questions no one asked during the industrial revolution and look what happened. That's not to say that what is arising from the Age of Technology isn't good, but we need more people, especially the innovators and inventors, to ask the tough, ethical questions that have to be addressed or we could end up in an even bigger mess. This is something that is not necessarily attended to in the patent/IP process and one point I will be examining in my paper, should we incorporate more of an ethics review into the patent process and even require this in the course of R&D? While there are some ethical hurdles an invention must overcome before a patent is granted, there are also many loop holes. Recently, a diagnostic test for locating a certain gene known to cause cancer in a particular group of Jewish women was granted a patent even after many appeals and controversy. Now the women who need or want to be tested have to go through this specific company or one of its designated subsidiaries and pay four times the amount of what this kind of test costs for other people, just to get a yes or no that could possibly save a life. We are also facing this problem with vaccines for flu, certain infectious diseases, and much more. So where do we draw the line???