The concepts of good, wicked and evil aren’t just something writers need to explore, they need to be explored in all walks of life. These definitions which many wish to believe are hard and fast are actually quite fluid.
You have all heard about the movie “Schindler’s List” even if you haven’t managed to see it. Here was a man that was at least wicked if not evil in his exploitation of workers yet, due to a much bigger evil in the same place at the same time he became viewed as a hero. I have long told my coworkers in IT that if you think your software is idiot proof you simply haven’t tested with a big enough idiot. The same is true in real life. An entity can move from evil to good without ever changing simply because the environment in which it exists changes.
A very good example of this came up recently. You might have heard the Scott Pelley report on “60 Minutes” about a clinical trial using Polio to cure cancer. Yes, Polio. A disease universally branded as evil now appears to be the thermonuclear weapon against cancer. Ages ago school kids in America and other countries were required to get Polio vaccinations to attend school. There was a concerted effort to eradicate Polio from civilized countries. Even now the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is trying to eradicate Polio from the planet.
What an odd twist of fate to learn this debilitating disease is now a biological weapon against a much more fatal disease. In the span of a few short months Polio has gone from an evil plague on mankind to something we have to farm, curate and maintain so it can do good in the world.
Remember when “First Strike Capabilities” were all the chatter of the Cold War? There was all kinds of rhetoric about how this line of thinking would inevitably draw us into a nuclear war nobody could win. Well, “First Strike Capability” has been dusted off and repacked by the medical community. Now, according to a recent article in Popular Mechanics this strategy is being used not to cure, but to eliminate the horrible diseases associated with aging. How? By a multi-pronged and concerted effort to stop cells from aging.
Yes, we’ve all heard and read stories about elixirs of immortality and other concoctions to avoid dieing. Some of you have probably even written them. When you do a search at duckduckgo.com for “Forever Endeavor” you get many hits. It appears there is even a band of some kind using that name. Eternal life has been the promise of many a flim-flam artist through the years.
What is different now is all of this effort with the Human Genome project and cancer research, yes, even cancer is about to go from evil to just wicked. Average people can even participate in this research via BOINC and the World Community Grid project.
I suggest you find that issue of Popular Mechanics and read all of the articles in it. There is far too much for a single blog post and I’m not a medical professional. Basically, all of this research has lead to a critical discovery. Human cells age, cancer cells do not. They’ve even identified the part of the cell involved. Now they are focusing on how to give this non-aging trait to human cells.
Just how is this related to “First Strike Capability?” Simple, deny the enemy a foot hold and you don’t have to repair any damage. The bulk of our most debilitating diseases associated with old age happen because we age. They aren’t inevitable. Natural evolution would get rid of most of those traits in a few million years. Scientists today are looking to move the calendar forward. They challenged the belief.
This is an approach which used to be widely used in farming. Before we had nasty pesticides which kill off way more than just the cut worms and root worms farmers wanted, there was a simple practice to protect your corn crop from such creatures. It was called crop rotation. You planted corn one year then soybeans or some other non-corn-like crop the next. If a field had a bad infestation you did 2-3 years of other crops before trying corn again. Quite simply you starved the larva out. Anything can become immune to poison given time and controlled exposure but starvation is the ultimate form of pest control. If they are unable to adapt to a new food source, they die.