Question

What is the role of science and technology in the care of the health and well-being of people?

Compare some novel invention that has benefited the health of the communities in different parts of the world.

Answer 1

Research is medicine's field of dreams fro which we harvest new findings about the causes,treatment and prevention of disease.Food and water safety,improved hygiene and sanitation,vaccibes,antibiotics and other medications,better nutrition and improved access to health care extended average lifespan of people by more than 30 years.That is 40 percent increase in lifespan.This represents a greater increase than occured in the prior 200,000 years that the human species has existed.

By generating new knowledge and fueling innovations,science provides solutions to national and global health challenges.In fact,more has been learned about health and diseases in the past 50 years than in the entire history of medicines.This transformation over the past half century in knowledge about our health has been driven by two major discoveries:the semi conductor in 1947 that led to the development of computers,and of DNA in 1953 that led to the emergence of a new field ,genetic medicine,which is illuminating the very building blocks of life.In 2003,scientists,completed mapping of the human genome-a monumental accomplishment that resulted from an international scientific collaboration begun in 1990.

Learning more about genes is leading us to a better understanding of disease,earlier detection of illness and to the development of designer drugs targeting specific genetic misspellings so that certain illness might not have to develop in the first place.It has also produced a new filed of personalised medicine where interventions are targeted to the molecular mechanisms and biological signature of a person's illness.For example,much like antibiotics revolutionized the treatment of infectious diseases,in the war against cancer,a whole new generation of therapies is being designed based on new knowledge about what gives cancer life in the first place.New treatments are being developed to trick cancer cells into self-desructing.Other strategies include targeting the genes that tell cancer cells to divide and turning them off.Still other approaches include medications that choke off the blood supply that cancer cells need to grow as well as monoclonal antinodies and vaccines to boost the immune system to fight cancer more effectively as well as to prevent the disese from even occuring in the first place.

Over the past 50 years, witnessed more gains in the human development than at any time in history.Small pox,a disease that had killed millions of people,was eradicated.In the last twenty years,polio infections have decreased 99 percent as a result of global efforts to eradicate this disease.Antiretroviral medications to treat HIV/AIDS have been developed that have saved the lives of millions.Soon the results of scientific studies conducted in multiple countries will reveal whether these medications can be taken as a prevention pill to stop transmission of the virus before infection.Recent research has also found that microbicid gel reduced HIV transmission by 40%,providing hope for a prevention technology for women worldwide.And studies are underway to develop new prevention strategies,including vaccines to prevent infections with HIV/AIDS and malaria.

Charles Darwin changed the whole course of biological thinking,and Gregor mendel laid the ground for the new science of genetics,which was used later to describe how Darwinism evolution came about.Louis pasteur and Robert Koch founded modern microbiology and Claude Bernard and his followers enunciated the seminal principle of the constancy of the internal environment of the body,a notion that profoundly influenced the development of physiology and biochemistry.With the birth of cell theory,mern pathology was established.These advances in biological sciences were accompanied by practical developments,including the invention of the atethoscope and an instrument for measuring BP,the first use of x-rays,the development of anasthesia and early attempts at the classification of psychiatric disease as well as a more human approach to its management.

Significant advances in public health occured on both sides of Atlantic.After the cholera epidemics of the mid 19th century,public health boards were established in many European and American countries.

Research in basic human biology and the biomedical sciences is entering the most excited phase of its development.The great potential of advances in the biomedical sciences for global health will not come to full fruition without much closer interaction between the fields of basic and clinical research and the fields of public health,health economics and the social sciences.