How many lives have been saved by modern medical science since the turn of the century? I think the number is likely uncountable. Or is it? According to the US Census Bureau, there are 7,569 in America alone. Let’s speculate that each hospital saves 1 life per day. Some are likely many more per day, others maybe one per week, maybe as low as one per month, but all in all, it averages out to about one per day. So that’s 7,569 lives saved per day, 2,762,685 lives per year, and an incredible 22,101,480, since the year 2000. 69,067,125, if you count up the lives saved by modern medicine in the last 25 years. Modern medicine is also responsible for the double-lung transplant a 5 year-old girl received in 2006! I didn’t even know they were doing lung transplants, didn’t know it was possible, and yet, as early as 2002, they did it in a baby who was only 3 months old! On top of that, they are ALSO doing complete heart AND lung transplants! Along the lines of other sciences, we are on the verge of new technology in the field of solar energy as a company announced a bio-energy based solar cell. Which means a battery that will never go bad! A solar storage cell that will never have to be replaced or run out! Hell… the fact that I can share my thoughts here is a tremendous technological advance.

Know why these advances happened? Because in the early 1960’s President Kennedy said we would put a man on the moon. Know why that happened? Because in the 1950’s, President Eisenhower started the space program. Know why that happened? Because of the birth of a boy in 1889 to a man who was a child and wife abuser. A boy teased like all children by his classmates and peers at school, children who happened to be Jewish. A boy who would later in life cause the entire Jewish race to become outlaws in their own homes and cities. Who would bring the world to arms once again and discover that his voice and the failed dreams of his teen and younger years would forever dominate the path of the world to come. This boy who’s name struck fear in to the hearts of every person in every first-world nation everywhere, even still to do this day. That boy, Adolf Hitler, born of a Custom’s Officer who married his own niece, who grew up bring the world to the brink of destruction.

Now… here is the question of ethics:

Do you think the sacrifices made in the past are worth the lives we have today? Would you trade the world we have now, for the six million Jews executed during World War II, the untold countless numbers of dead from bombing, shelling, and fighting…soldiers and civilians alike?

What brought this question up? I was driving home this weekend and noticed a new billboard on the side of the tollway. It didn’t have a picture of a beautiful starlet advertising a movie or begging for you to buy this or that new product. It had a picture of a handsome-looking little boy with a cleft lip/palette, and announced a new surgery center for low-income people that runs on donations, but could fix this child’s malady. It made me think of the technological advances that have come about to get us to this point where we can offer surgery of this fashion to anyone, anywhere. I am amazed and pleased at the same time. :)