Not an SF only phenomenon. Things equally disruptive of property rights happen all around US. America actually scores less on property rights than most hardcore "socialist" countries.
Many Chinese coming to USA are astonished to see a "capitalist" nation being so dirigistic and dismissive of property rights.
The idea that bureaucrats and scientists should be able to decide what experiments a terminally ill patient should be allowed to participate in is a deeply evil one.
"Deeply evil"? Is this based on ideological considerations which reject any sort of government oversight?
We have experience of what sort of quack "medicine" appears when unscrupulous people take advantage of the hopes of the terminally ill for personal gain.
Is that what you want us to return to? Or do you have a way to prevent it?
If I am dying, what right have you to tell me what experimental treatment I can take or not, if I otherwise have no hope to live? You would condemn me to no hope at all in order to save me from what you consider to be unproven or possible quackery.
People in the US in the last months of their lives, in desperation, go to Mexico for "treatment" by methods which have never ever worked.
> One hospital we visited offered homeopathic treatments. (Homeopathy is a form of quack medicine essentially based on the mystical principle of "like cures like.")
> Another, respectable-looking hospital offered such "alternative" treatments for cancer as shark cartilage, mega-doses of vitamins, and "prayer therapy." The hospital also offered Laetrile, a notorious cancer treatment discredited by repeated scientific studies.
> ... Donsbach's clinic had a reputation for providing questionable medical procedures, including "ultraviolet blood purification," colonics (a potentially dangerous colon-irrigation therapy), and the use of microwaves to "heat" cancer cells.
It would have been easier if you had said that my first statement was essentially correct - your belief is based on an ideological consideration which rejects government oversight on the broad topic of "life and death."
So you reject the idea of Informed Consent? Hell why stop at right to try let simply take away all medical choices for everyone, If the doctor says something you will be compelled to do it, Second Opinion, no way, clearly the doctor is the professional and you as a individual are too stupid to make your own choices for your life
Wow... I really thought I would die before humanity would embrace a dystopian technocracy where all Self Agency is removed completely from the individual...
That's a very extreme reading of my implication that laypeople aren't able to just take a crash course in a particular disease or drug and make a well-informed decision.
Do you disagree with all individual restrictions? Should we eliminate the concept of prescription drugs, so that anyone can go buy Adderall or Accutane without a doctor's approval?
>>Do you disagree with all individual restrictions? Should we eliminate the concept of prescription drugs, so that anyone can go buy Adderall or Accutane without a doctor's approval?
Yes, and Yes.
I believe all drugs should be legal, and OTC. I own my own body and what I choose to consume is none of anyone business but my own.
The idea that you should have any say at all as to what chemicals I consume is absurd to me.
Do you support say making it illegal for a person to buy their own brakes for their car? Instead forcing people only to have their cars repaired by government certified mechanics?
It seems odd to me that we allow anyone to work on a car, something that could actually endanger others, yet we severally restrict what people can do to themselves
I am 100% for complete and total individual freedom provided that freedom is not directly harming OTHER PEOPLE, I am opposed to any restrictions upon my individual liberty which includes my liberty to harm myself up to and including suicide
The evil "bureaucrats and scientists" are there to force the vulnerable people to not use wholesome providers of supplements that will fix their body's Ph so that it can get more alkaline.
These evil practices all work to stop people having access to things as basic as Elixir sulfanilamide[1], Thalidomide[2].
If only there were already some example of the FDA allowing victims of terminal diseases to have access to drugs that might save their lives if there was overwhelming evidence that they would at the very least work? Like imagine if a drug demonstrated an immediate overwhelming success in treatment but had not yet had sufficient trials to determine side effects and safety? HIV victims could certainly have benefited from AZT before the full side effect profiles were known. It's so sad that they didn't get access to it. Oh wait, they did [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_sulfanilamide - "We have been supplying a legitimate professional demand and not once could have foreseen the unlooked-for results. I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part."
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zidovudine - HIV and AZT actually did result in the laws allowing exemptions for terminal cases. The difference between those, and "right to try" nonsense is that the terminal disease exemptions still require a degree of solid evidence of function, and a demonstration of safety vs alternatives.
The alternative to high quality scientific data determining what drugs patients choose is corporate marketing efforts determining what drugs patients get.
The FDA restricts "snake oil" sales by requiring products be marketed based on good data. Remove that requirement and patients will be bombarded by marketers and salespeople peddling exaggerated claims to get at the potentially lucrative right to sell a drug
Ceres was also reasonably considered a planet, until evidence was discovered that showed it was just one of many similar bodies.
Including Pluto in a classification with the 8 major planets, but not including Eris, is simply not a useful way to describe the bodies in the solar system.
Personally, I use the word “planet” for anything even vaguely planet-like, but there's no logical way to count “planets”, under any definition of the word, that leads to Pluto being the 9th.
The first four detected asteroids, in fact. They were all discovered in a 6 year period during the early 19th century. And all were labelled planets.
That's how things sat for years, decades even. And then in a span of 5 years in the late 1840s the next 6 asteroids were discovered. By the end of the 1850s they were up to 57 asteroids, in the 1860s they found more than 50 more, in the 1870s they found over a hundred more than that. It had become rapidly apparent that Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta weren't just little quirky oddball planets, they were merely members of a much larger population of other bodies (that would come to be known as asteroids) separate from the planets.
The situation is identical with Pluto, the only difference being that Pluto was alone in its new classification of "little quirky oddball planet" in the 20th century for about 80 years. But now it has become apparent that Pluto isn't a weird little planet, it's a member of a different family of objects (Trans-Neptunians, of which Triton was probably also a member before being captured by Neptune).
I was really hoping this was a reprint of an article from 1930 and not something written this week.
I have two young daughters. They like space as much as any not-yet-in-gradeschool kids might. We only buy planet books in our family that include Pluto as a planet.
