🚀 go-pugleaf

R S Rodgers (rsrodger@wam.umd.edu) wrote:

: >The government, auto manufacturers and electric utilities are spending 
: >significant amounts of money to speed up battery R&D.

: 	Ah, the AIDS approach to research: throw more dollars at it, 
: 	and you're bound to solve the problem.  This is also the approach
: 	used with cancer research (progress: none, mostly, death rates have
: 	been pretty much constant since 1960).  

	Not a fair comparison:  AIDS is a tough nut to crack, and more
is known about the HIV virus than any other virus in history.  It just
doesn't lend itself nearly as easily to vaccination as smallpox.
	With regard to cancer, just death rates due to cancer are
probably the wrong way to look at the problem.  Do patients survive
longer after cancer is diagnosed?   Are some cancers curable? (Hodgkins
disease notably, yes.)  Has life expectancy gone up, and with it, the
likelihood that more older people will develop cancer?  I think
progress has definitely been made on that front -- in other cases,
despite spending (Appalachian poverty, educational standards in rural
America), progress has NOT been very significant.


===============================================
|  James G. Acker                             |
|  REPLY TO:   jgacker@neptune.gsfc.nasa.gov  |
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