Word: humanely
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course, on this question of old age, science is still a baby. There are plenty of biologists who believe that aging and death are as inevitable as taxes. No one really knows if human longevity will come up against a fixed barrier somewhere or if, like the sound barrier, it is there only to be broken. Some gerontologists say the limit of the average life-span is 85 years; others, 95, 100, 150 and beyond. No one understands the economic barriers either. Ronald Lee, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, calculates that for each year...
Maybe that's not exactly the way pills will be dispensed 25 years from now, but you can be sure that at molecular biology's current pace, it will be something like that. By then scientists will have decoded the entire human genome--all 140,000 or so genes that largely say who we are and which of 4,000 diseases our flesh is heir to. They will also have found exactly where common disease-causing errors lie along the genome's long, interlocked chains...
...drugs will be designed "rationally" on computer screens, using gene information as a blueprint. VEGF2, for example, is a synthetic gene that makes a protein that in turn stimulates new vessel growth. In a few years, predicts William Haseltine, the biotech industry's champion optimist and CEO of Human Genome Sciences, based in Rockville, Md., we will have genetically based drugs for almost every serious ailment--"things we couldn't really work on well before, whether it's osteoporosis or Alzheimer's." Nor will these drugs simply attack symptoms, as aspirin does. "That's a chemical crutch," he says...
...fiction. "I never like to say that something's impossible," says Dr. Evan Snyder, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital in Boston. "I've been burned too many times by categorically ruling something out. And yet I can't imagine that 20 years from now human-brain transplants will be possible. The connections required are just too complex; they number in the millions. But the future of brain-cell transplants--that's another matter...
...their ability to move and speak. The disease is caused by the slow deterioration of brain cells that produce dopamine, a chemical essential for the transmission of messages from the brain to the rest of the body. A decade ago, Swedish researchers started implanting dopamine-producing cells from human fetuses into the brains of Parkinson's patients. The treatment improved the mobility of many of the patients but usually only partly and in some cases not at all. Even if the treatment becomes more successful (and the ethically charged issue of mining aborted fetuses is overcome), it can hardly become...