Charles Arntzen is the Regents’ Professor and Florence Ely Nelson Presidential Chair of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. Dr. Arntzen is known as a pioneer in the development of edible plant-based vaccines, and he has also been a key collaborator on what appears to be a promising new Ebola drug.
The Washington Post recently reported that:
It took nearly three decades of tireless research and countless millions of U.S. government dollars to produce a few grams of the experimental Ebola drug that may have saved the lives of two U.S. missionaries stricken by the virus in West Africa.
And now some are asking this question: If the drug did help missionaries Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, whose conditions appear to be improving, could the same drug be given to the hundreds of people dying of Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria?
What would it cost? What are the ethics of distributing a drug that had never been tested on humans in foreign countries — even if medical authorities could persuade people to take it? And how fast could it be done?
“Two months,” said Charles J. Arntzen, a professor at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, who has collaborated for the past 15 years with Mapp Biopharmaceutical, the small San Diego company that produced the experimental serum given to the two Americans. “Maybe they could do it in a month. If they were [already] planning on it, I’m sure they could produce 10,000 doses in a month.”
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was more cautious in an interview on CNN on Tuesday. “It is not easy to make this serum,” he said. “The number of doses that are available right now, today . . . is less than a handful.
Two months, or maybe even one month! Wow, this certainly seems like a miracle, right? The only problem is this guy is kind of creepy. In fact, he was apparently caught in 2012 joking about culling 25% of the world’s population to solve the challenging problem of feeding 8 billion people.
It was all caught on video:
Quite the comedian.
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
Creepy, yes. Wrong, no. It is a challenging problem to try to feed 8 billion people who are too stupid to limit their procreation to environments conducive to the raising of offspring. Even earthworms are smart enough to do that. People? Not so much. Just look for places where everyone gets sick from dirty water or experiences regular famines and you will see them breeding like rabbits, which is precisely what caused their dirty water and famines in the first place.
Now, there is a good argument to be made that I am blaming human overpopulation on the world’s poorest people, which is hardly fair when Americans comprise 5% of the world’s population and consume anywhere from 25%-35% of its resources – I’ve seen various numbers, all well above 5%.
Fair enough. Americans should stop breeding, too.
But in response to that argument, I would also ask, don’t you want the world’s poorest people to be LESS poor? Would you like to see them have clean water, enough food, comfortable homes, and modern medicine? Well then there needs to be fewer people in the poor countries, too! Because to elevate their standard of living, that means the existing people would consume more resources. So we’re right back to square one.
EVERYONE needs to stop breeding, I don’t care where you live.
Don’t have kids.
Damn Priate Jo , you can be depressing especially when it comes to children. I don’t have any children of my own so maybe that’s the reason I have a more favorable attitude toward them.
That was my comment . I don’t know why anonymous keeps popping up.
” … he was apparently caught in 2012 joking about culling 25% of the world’s population to solve the challenging problem of feeding 8 billion people.” ———- from the article
pfffft
25% is too low.
Of course, The Proper Politically Correct answer is ………. “OH MY GOD!! WHAT A TERRIBLE THING TO SAY!!!”.
But, thinking people know there aren’t too many other options left.
bb, if I truly hated humanity and wanted everyone to have shitty lives, I’d be standing on a corner holding a sign, encouraging everyone to have as many kids as they were biologically capable of producing.
MAPP Biopharmaceuticals will be “inverting” next week.
I second Pirate Jo to the last word.
That is only one of the many reasons that I cannot understand the religious wingnuts who crusade against birth control.
As for those who resent having to pay for other women’s contraception with your money, I have these questions, and these requests:
1. If you don’t want to pay for their contraception, do you want to pay for their BABIES; and if they can’t afford contraception, can they afford kids? Think about this while you compare the cost of contraception and sterilization to the cost of a singleton delivery (never mind multiple birth) delivery, post natal care; food and other necessities for 18 years, nevermind the cost of incarcerating millions of misbegotten fuckups and thugs born to 14-year-old mommas, at a cost of $40,000 a year each on average… and forget about the cost to their victims.
2. If you don’t want to pay for contraception, why do I have to pay for your babies by offsetting the tax deduction for each child, by the extra taxes I pay? Never mind the dozens of other direct and indirect subsidies that middle class families get, like public schools, “free” city trash pickup for SF houses (mostly occupied by families) vs a commercial hauler for apt buildings, and unmetered flat rate water for SF homes vs metered water for apt buildings.
We need to stop rewarding people for having children, and socializing the cost of that among the childless. We need to make people take full responsibility for their broods. We can start by not only paying for the contraception for women receiving welfare, but we should darn well MAKE THEM use it as a condition of collecting welfare. Every female on welfare age 12 and over should be implanted with Depo-provera, and little rewards should be given for voluntary sterilization. Needless to say, any middle class woman who wants a sterilization should not be prevented from getting one by intrusive laws such as that passed in supposedly freedom-loving Texas, which prohibits sterilization for women who have had less than 3 children.
Regarding the ethics of distributing an experimental drug that has never been tested on humans, to treat a disease that is lethal in 50% to 90% of those infected… well, if you have this disease, you will try anything. I would personally grasp at anything that offered hope.
It seems unethical NOT to offer at least the choice to people who will most likely die with current methods of treatment.
@PJ – “But in response to that argument, I would also ask, don’t you want the world’s poorest people to be LESS poor? Would you like to see them have clean water, enough food, comfortable homes, and modern medicine? Well then there needs to be fewer people in the poor countries, too! Because to elevate their standard of living, that means the existing people would consume more resources.”
Reducing their numbers won’t make them less poor, there will just be fewer people killing each other over a handful of goats or a revenge killing from two decades ago.
Tribal people will be tribal until a strong enough leader rises up and kills/terrifies the rest of them into toe-ing the line of civility. Enough effective tyrants in a row, and eventually civility will become the norm instead of the exception.
We can’t force 600 years of civilization on people who aren’t interested in it. So, we can either stay the fuck out and let them kill each other until something rises from the ashes thats worth dealing with, or we can move in and conquer it ourselves.
As for the actual article, graveyard humor is typical for those who deal with such things. If you can’t laugh at death a little then you are living in fear.
That is only one of the many reasons that I cannot understand the religious wingnuts who crusade against birth control. ~999444
But then they go and cheer the bombing of kids in foreign lands while kissing poisonous serpents. Really, I had a discussion outside a hotel one evening as I was walking back from the beer store when I smelled burning ganja. They were smoking weed. They told me God created the devil. Wow. So thats why they kiss snakes. Then they helped me drink my beer.
Probably how bb got bit by that snake.
@Chemist,
Can’t say I disagree with you. People were fighting and killing each other back when there were only a few million of us.
But allow me this excerpt from the book ‘Countdown’ by Alan Weisman. It is about a man named Mamane, the chief of a village in Niger:
“His oldest son, Inoussa, squatting at the edge of his father’s mat in a dark blue flowing djalabiya and purple prayer cap, adds some figures in the dirt with his finger. “Last year, this village lost a hundred and eighty children.” Inoussa, forty-two, has three wives who have borne him eleven children, six still alive. He is considered rich because he farms an entire hectare himself. Fifty years ago, everyone had two hectares, but the land has been so partitioned among multiple sons that the two hectares that once supported a family of twenty now must support sixty or seventy.”
Can you really say, in light of this, that reducing their numbers wouldn’t make them less poor? They certainly seem poorer now than they were fifty years ago, as a direct result of overbreeding.
Who gave Chicago three thumbs down? Sooner or later we are going to have to figure out that making more people is a problem when resources start to run out. I’ve grown up with the same platitudes like ‘Children are our future!’ as everyone else, but for chrissake. Do you want to see the United States stagger under the weight of a billion people? Sooner or later you reach the point where it’s in the public’s best interest to stop subsidizing breeding, and I think we have already reached that point, especially where it concerns the dumbest and least capable.
“Sooner or later you reach the point where it’s in the public’s best interest to stop subsidizing breeding, and I think we have already reached that point, especially where it concerns the dumbest and least capable.”
And therein lies the problem. Anyone with a three digit IQ (and many without) can figure out that we would be better off if smarter, healthier and generally better people had more children, and dumber, sicker and otherwise less fit people had few or none. There was quite a movement for this from c. 1850 to 1950. It dubbed itself scientific, it had a mix of science, pseudoscience and bigotry, and its effects are debatable. But thanks to History’s Greatest Villain ™ who has merely at the far periphery of this movement, since a few years after that significant unpleasantness across the pond this topic has been 100.0000% absolutely Verboten!
Meanwhile birth control has become quite cheap, easy to obtain and relatively convenient. Guess who is smart and responsible enough to use it? Yup, smarter people. Guess who isn’t? Dumber people. So guess which population is growing at a faster rate (several times faster)? Dumber people.
I totally agree with your identification of the problem. I can see some solutions, none of which are going to be politically popular, most won’t be palatable, and frankly all will be far too late to be done in any decent fashion. But they will happen one way or another, whether done by direct human actions or indirectly by inactions and failures.
If you want to reduce the worlds population:
1. Don`t send food to areas of famine.
2. Don`t send medicine of any kind to areas where there are epidemics.
3. Don`t drill wells or finance water or sanitation projects in 3rd world countries.
4.Do send as many arms as possible to anywhere the is a conflict. (both sides)
5. No aid programs of any kind anywhere with the exception of military aid.
It is after all the moral thing to do.
“we would be better off if smarter, healthier and generally better people had more children”
I’m not so sure we would be better off if smarter, healthier, and generally better people had more kids, Persnickity. I grew up in the 60s in a city neighborhood heavily populated by conservative Catholics who commonly had 5 kids, and families with 8-12 kids were not uncommon. One family had 16 kids. We were in the minority, being a household of two girls headed by a divorcee of moderate means.
These were “middle class” people who ranged from well-paid union blue collar, clear up to well-paid professionals such as engineers and middle management. What I just could not help but notice is how many of these households were disorderly to the point of being downright squalid, despite being headed by men who made scads more money than my mother, and who often had 4-8 years of college. I also could not help but notice how many of the kids in these households failed to live up to the standard set by their parents. Only a third, if even, became anything like as successful as their dads, and most ended up in mediocre occupations at best, while many others were lost to drugs.
One study done in the 80s revealed that a child from an affluent home with 5 or more children had no better opportunities than 1 child born to poor parents. I believe that after watching the families we lived among. Their houses were dumps and the typical level of housekeeping appalled my mother so much she would not let us accept dinner invitations in these homes Two had alcoholic moms. Dad spent his nights at the local bowling alley just to escape from the noise and squalor in two others. In one family of 8 kids, whose dad had a huge income, one son was a hardcore delinquent by age 16, while one girl was borderline retarded, and all the girls went to school dressed in rags.
Even though my mother was not affluent, I got to go to camp, attend symphony performances, own books, and have amenities like my own room and nice clothes. We did not live lavishly, but we lived nicely. The large families, on the other hand, mostly lived like sharecropper peasants, except that Dad ALWAYS bought a new GM car on installment loans every 3 years, something my mother never did.
@Chicago: that’s an interesting example, but not the only possibility. Your example has many issues – huge Catholic families, the social norms and mentalities of that era, alcoholism, and not clearly stated but I strongly suspect a lot of poorly matched couples of nothing special intelligence. There was a time, relatively brief but probably on point for your experience, where going to college basically meant you were a white male other than a dirt poor southerner, and didn’t necessarily mean you were particularly smart. To sum, I suspect your example includes people who were not above average having and raising children in excessively large households.
My proposal is more along the lines of dumb people having zero kids and smart people having two or three. From what I’ve read, two is the optimum number for resulting intelligence of the children, with three causing a slight decline in the IQ of the third, and more than three having proportionally more effect.
Pirate Jo—When earthworms are stressed, environmentally, they produce more eggs not less, increasing the chance for species survival.
Sex is about the only thing people who are down and out have to enjoy, mix that with ignorance and you have a lot of babies.
Many years ago, when this Ebola thing surfaced, I heard 3 microbiologist discussing it on radio. They said that it was a recombinant virus with a bovine factor. WHO (World Health Organization) was doing experimentation with cattle on vaccines in Africa at that time. WHO sent a research team to study whether their experiments were responsible for Ebola. The results of that study have never seen the light of day.
Just saying.
@PJ – “They certainly seem poorer now than they were fifty years ago, as a direct result of overbreeding.”
I’d argue US Govt. intervention has a lot to blame for that. Shitty welfare policies that buy votes. In this country, breaking apart the family unit.
For other countries problems:
We overthrow their governments, encourage our corporations to strip mine other countries bare, subsidize food so cheap in our country that we make our own citizens fat and sell to other countries below what their farmers can grow it.
If they try to legitimately form their own country the US along with the IMF makes it impossible.
If the US backed the fuck off the world would plunge into a little dark age while they found their own identities, but in the long run it would be better for all of us.
As for overpopulation in the US, stop subsidizing food, stop giving the shitty food to the shitty people on MY dime, and stop shelling out so much to deadbeat moms’dads that contribute fuck all nothing to anyone at all.
People like me and my wife not having children will hurt the long term survival of the species, that I promise you.
I agree with the first post.
I examine ecologies for a living. Anywhere in nature, a balance has to be found. That is not some hippy nonsense either. Unchecked growth will continue until the species depletes nearby resources, at which point the species will be forced to migrate, starve, and/or succumb to disease.
Some species take advantage of a resource rush because of their inherent nature. Locusts come to mind, as do the various microorganisms that break down dead tissue.
More complex organisms tend to have evolved in an environment whereby they can achieve an equilibrium. You only have to look at a country that has suffered the effects of introduced species to see what happens when that equilibrium is suddenly (as opposed to gradually) disrupted by an invasive species; feral pigs, cats, dogs, rabbits, foxes, rodents, etc.
Humans are smart. One of our greatest gifts is our ability to adapt to and manipulate our environs. We should behave better than locusts, I don’t support the idea of politically motivated eugenics or depopulation, as that process will undoubtedly be co-opted by sociopaths. A slow de-growth on the other hand, seems like a better option…Unfortunately it seems almost impossible to implement, without the interference of centralised authorities and the psychopathic parasites that invariably chase positions of power within any kind of heirarchy.
Case in point: examine the long term consequences of China’s ‘One Child’ policy…A generation of pissed of bachelors that can’t get a date. Great for the central planners that want to start a war, not so good for the life of the average citizen with ordinary ambitions (such as peace, friends and family).
When it comes to culling, these assholes never want to start with themselves. There is a big difference between not having children and culling the herd.
“We would be better off if smarter, healthier and generally better people had more children.”
“People like me and my wife not having children will hurt the long term survival of the species, that I promise you.”
You’re still missing the point. We have reached the point where ANYONE having children hurts the long term survival of the species. I realize this is a mental adjustment, since for tens of thousands of years it has been the case that we needed more offspring to survive. Over just the last 50-60 years that truism has been completely turned on its head. Full means full.
If all humans stopped having kids for five years, the population would reduce by about one billion through attrition. It would be a step in the right direction.
Also, every time someone acknowledges the population issue but then goes on to qualify it with, ‘But it’s everyone ELSE who is the problem,’ I think, ‘Douchebag.’
Yes yes yes. Reduce the population. Pirate Jo start at your house.
“Yes yes yes. Reduce the population. Pirate Jo start at your house.” —- overthecliff
Rude and totally uncalled for.
@PJ – “We have reached the point where ANYONE having children hurts the long term survival of the species.”
Ah, you are looking at the carrying capacity of the world as a whole. I view it as several discrete units. Shit tons of fresh water in siberia do fuck all nothing for the people living in the Kalahari.
The US and others have upset this dynamic by subsidizing failing farmers in high yield areas so much that our surpluses can easily feed half the third world. Subsequently these people have been the ones who were fed fish, rather than taught how to fish. Industrialized cheap grain created a problem that it now is viewed as the only solution for. If you are a bleeding heart, that rationale makes a certain degree of sense, unfortunately that rationale kills thousands through war, disease, famine and poverty every year.
Stop redistributing the food “wealth” of the high producing areas to prop up areas that naturally should have a low carrying capacity. Its cruel, but if we don’t do it know eventually high producing areas will outlive their growing capacities making it impossible for them to export cheap food. Once those exports fail, famine will strike and millions will die. If we end the exports now then fewer will die then if we choose to do it later on.
Stop subsidizing farms in America. This creates a price floor and causes the US to have massive surpluses. Massive surpluses means food is cheap here. This makes for fat citizens, and allows us to sell to other countries below their own operating cost. Lower supply means prices will be higher, hopefully to the point that locals can afford to produce for a living.
Claiming that “stopping all child production” is the solution is nonsense I’m afraid. If you will look at industrialized nations their population growth levels has almost completely flatlined, and in many case is below the replacement rate.
Industrialized nations are not the problem. Developing/third world countries are. Want to reduce the population? I would start there.
“Yes yes yes. Reduce the population. Pirate Jo start at your house.”
Original. No, really, I haven’t already seen that a thousand times. I have some new ones for you, too, you’ll be a hit at parties.
http://7deadlysinners.typepad.com/sinners/2006/04/breeder_bingo_c.html
Got my tubes tied ten years ago, no kids. My work is done.
Killing myself, if that’s what you meant, wouldn’t make any difference.
@PJ……. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.. From a viewpoint of some 76 years from go, I think you, Chicago, T4C and TE have got more brains between the four of you than any 100 Central Floridians fleamales picked at random.
I got married at 19 (my sweetie was 18) and neither one of us had sufficient wisdom to beat sand in a rat hole. However, we both had common sense — immature common sense, you understand — but it beat the shit out of most of the others in our immediate age group at the time.
Annette and I wanted children – but only to the point of replacement in the scheme of things and we wanted them early so we could grow up with them. Growing up with your children is so much pure fun and satisfaction (and we had far more patience then than in later years) so I got a vasectomy at the tender age of 21 – with two healthy children – and enjoyed a marvelous worry free sex life from then on. Believe me, when both male and female are horny as hell in the twenties to late forties (and beyond for the female), it is really be fast and furious when your female partner no longer has to fret impregnation and can join in the fun to the full extent allowed.
Now I have my sweetie of 57 years, two daughters in their mid+50’s, 5 grandsons and 4 great grand children and still enjoy a marvelous relationship with them all especially with my truly wonderful lovely sweetheart who makes me smile, then laugh every morning of my life. (I try and return the favor.)
Back to the subject of the thread. I fear greatly for my great grand sons’ lives and their families simply because I cannot figure out a way from things to stay in one piece for them to enjoy even a modest portion of the life I’ve lead. No doubt, human beings are the more intelligent and flexible beings on the face of the planet. They are also the most evil, greedy and cruel beings on the face of the earth as far as personal survival is concerned and civilization is a mile wide and three meals thick. Three meals thick is a pretty narrow area.
Pure goodness and cooperation and team efforts to survive is not an automatic human condition.
Put it all in a basket and hope for the best.
MA
Based on where we appear to be at in the various cycles (fourth turning, fourth wave, etc., we are in for a shitstorm somewhat worse than the Great Depression, starting sometime in the next decade or so, with the possibility of natural disasters and epidemics worsening and complicating things. These same cycles strongly indicate that this will probably not be any sort of ultimate end. That doesn’t mean the Human Race will necessarily escape the Huxley-type future Admin has been discussing, and begin the next wave up with severely diminished numbers and prospects..