drink the happy juice

The Perfesser's talking disease and death and it's actually somewhat informative and upfront for a while: bird flu, bad, might not happen this year, or ever, we might need better defenses, etc., etc. All fairly good arguments until he links to and cites Ray Kurzweil's testimony to Congress on nanotechnology and pharmaceuticals:

As I noted above, the software industry is almost completely unregulated. The same is obviously not the case for biotechnology. A bioterrorist does not need to put his ‘innovations’ through the FDA. However, we do require the scientists developing the defensive technologies to follow the existing regulations, which slow down the innovation process at every step....

WTF? WTF?

Yup, I can see it now: millions of people willing to take drugs they don't need and might not work, the use of which will have been approved without debate, that haven't been tested for safety and are free from liability lawsuits all because the terrorists could sequence our individual genomes in seconds and devise a way to shut down our internal hard drive like a worm virus. Brave. New. World.


[note: antivirals and antibiotics are good things for government and the industry to jointly develop and the same goes for nanotechnology. Throwing out regulations left and right for no really good reason isn't a good thing. The approval process is there for a reason: more often than not, it works out well for us.]