Word: humanism
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...Life, if you're a bacterium or virus, boils down to this: finding a pristine human home to provide for your every need, from food and nutrients to shelter against biological storms. As a microbial drifter, you can literally travel the world, hopping from host to host when the opportunity presents itself or when conditions at your temporary residence start heading south. There's no worry about taking along life's necessities either-viruses in particular are adept at traveling light; incapable of reproducing on their own, they think nothing of co-opting the reproductive machinery of their cellular sponsors...
...theory, a year of human life is priceless. In reality, it's worth...
Stanford economists have demonstrated that the average value of a year of quality human life is actually closer to about $129,000. To get to that number, Stefanos Zenios and his colleagues at Stanford Graduate School of Business used kidney dialysis as a benchmark. Every year dialysis saves the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who would otherwise die of renal failure while waiting for an organ transplant. It is also the one procedure that Medicare has covered unconditionally since 1972 despite rapid and sometimes expensive innovations in its administration. To tally the cost-effectiveness of such innovations Zenios...
...settings, dialysis is unlikely to provide any meaningful benefit." But with organs including kidneys for transplant so scarce, is it justifiable to deny these patients a chance to live through dialysis? It is a question, Zenios says, everyone should approach with trepidation. "What is the true value of a human life? That's what we're asking people," he adds. "I wouldn't pretend to know...
...famous Shwedagon pagoda. The Naypyidaw version, though, remains unfinished. At the building site, groups of child laborers - some appearing no older than six - lug heavy rocks on woven stretchers and swing pickaxes into the hard earth. Burma's junta has long been considered one of the world's worst human-rights abusers. But the country's generals don't have to see these tiny laborers build a golden temple for their Abode of Kings. That's because the generals are bunkered in another, faraway part of the city, in a vast military zone off-limits to foreign tourists - a sector...