Word: question
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Will we still worry about Alzheimer's disease in the next century? What a question! With the population of elderly expected to double by 2025, we'll be beside ourselves with worry--unless, of course, doctors figure out how to treat Alzheimer's or, better yet, prevent it. A quarter-century from now, the number of people suffering from dementia in the U.S. alone is projected to rise from 4 million to at least 8 million. "That will bankrupt our medical system financially and emotionally," says Bill Thies, head of medical and scientific affairs at the Alzheimer's Association...
...whole anytime soon. Treatments may be many years off, they caution, and only incrementally helpful--restoring wrist motion to a person who has none, for example. Most researchers, though, are more optimistic. Over the course of 10 years, they say, the riddles of the cord have been solved. The question now is not what the treatments for an injured spine should be, but how best to implement them. At hospitals such as the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the University of Florida, human trials are already getting under way. Studies at other hospitals are sure to follow. Says Black...
Talk about wishful thinking. One might as well ask if there will be a war that will end all wars, or a pill that will make us all good looking. It is also a perfectly understandable question, given that half a million Americans will die this year of a disorder that is often discussed in terms that make it seem less like a disease than an implacable enemy. What tuberculosis was to the 19th century, cancer is to the 20th: an insidious, malevolent force that frightens people beyond all reason--far more than, say, diabetes or high blood pressure...
...metaphorical answer to this question is more important than the literal, but the literal is irresistibly short: No, unfortunately not. Humans will have at our disposal as much gasoline as we can burn in the 21st century. Nor are we likely to run out of heating oil, coal or natural gas, the other carbon-based fuels that have powered industrial civilization for 200 years...
...Will we run out of gas?"--a question we began asking during the oil shocks of the 1970s--is now the wrong question. The earth's supply of carbon-based fuels will last a long time. But if humans burn anywhere near that much carbon, we'll burn up the planet, or at least our place...