Medicine and Technology, go hand and hand

          Technology is always changing. Look around are world, each day new products come out that try to help us make our daily lives easier. Unfortunately people don’t look at the negatives of technology. For example, a person playing their i Pods/mp3’s at high volume. This is the beginning of hearing loss throughout a young person’s life. Although this can easily be avoided by just turning your music down, people don’t seem to realize that technology is supposed to help you, not harm you. The progression of technology is the most noticeable in the medical department.

Ultrasound Machine being used to view a baby

          Technology plays a big role in medicine. It has made operations go more smoothly, it also helps diagnose a patience symptom quicker, so that the patient may receive early treatment. Technology in the form of machines, systems, and instruments has helped medical, the recovery of patients, and lessened the pain one goes through. There are many medical machines that help things go smoothly in hospitals. For example, the X-ray machine.  Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered the first X-ray when a image cast appeared from his cathode ray generator. From there, Röntgen gave this new form of radiation it’s the name “x-ray” x standing for unknown. The x-ray machine allows doctors to see under the skin, to examine the bones in order to look for breaks or factures. Another important medical machine used is an ultrasound machine, Doctor Karl Theodore Dussik of Austria and Professor Ian Donald of Scotland developed the ultrasound machine in the 1950’s. The purpose of the ultrasound machine is what’s inside the body, much like and x-ray machine, it can help spot a tumour, analyze bone, or commonly used for examining the health of an unborn baby.

X-ray machine 

          Without the help of these two machines, diagnose a person’s illness would be very tough. The purpose of these medical machines and others that I haven’t mentioned is to help doctors find the symptoms behind a person’s illness earlier. Without these machines it would be hard to find the issue of a person walking into a hospital. You would have to try and do your complete diagnosis by only what you could see outside of the body and what the person is describing to you. As time goes by technology will continue to grow and newer and smarter machines will be created to continue to help find the cures for diseases, such as cancer. One thing’s for certain, without technology our lives would be much different. But with the help of technology and medicine, we can continue to look for cures and save the lives of people in need.

Future of Technology is us 

Sources:

http://science.hq.nasa.gov/kids/imagers/ems/xrays.html

http://ultrasound-machines.bafree.net/

http://health.howstuffworks.com/medicine/tests-treatment/x-ray.htm

http://ultrasoundmachineguru.com/

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A Change in the Way Food is Produced

        The world as we know it continues to grow and with more humans means more food to help feed them. But do we really know where our food comes from? When you eat a hamburger for example, as great as it tastes, do you really know where that meat came from? Sustainable agriculture is the classic way of farming. Just like how you see it on TV. It includes Responsible farmers who treat their cattle the same way they would treat a family member. It’s also healthier and doesn’t harm the environment. Industrial agriculture is like farming but is able to create larger amounts of food and drinks but at a price. They rely on drugs to help boost the size of cattle, also where the animals live and how they are treated is very poor. Both of these forms of producing agriculture are complete opposites of each other.

Sustainable Farming 

            The world’s population is said to be 6.8 billion but grows by 83 million people each year. It worries me that with that many people living in our world today, how could we possibly be able to feed every single one of them? To be honest we have 6.8 billion people in our world today but yet there are still people starving for food in Africa. So if we have people starving in Africa and around the world, how exactly can we be prepared for the steady increase in population EVERY YEAR! Now would sustainable agriculture be a good choice for keeping our world vitalized? Well, this would mean we would have to increase the food production by 70%. This would be impossible to do with sustainable agriculture, which is why industrial agriculture seems to be the way to go.

Industrial Farm

Little to no space to move around

            Industrial agriculture isn’t the right choice but at the same time do we really have another choice? Not only is it cheaper to buy but it is also quicker. “Factory Farms” are what modern day farming is being called. They are large industrial buildings that process food in large bulk to be sent around the world for consumers to purchase. The real name for these “farms” is Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFO’s. A normal CAFO contains a large number of different animals. So one may have 1000 cattle, while another may have 100,000 chickens. Now with that many animals, can you imagine how they are forced to live. Well they live in a very close confined space beside their fellow species. They are drugged and mutated to adapt to the factories surroundings. They are also given low amounts of anti-biotic to ward of diseases and promote faster 

growth.

  

Price Choppers eh?

          Now knowing what you know, would you still by products from your supermarket? Of course you would, what choice do we have. I believe you can still buy products which are naturally made and farmed but for the most part you will be buying products that are produced in Factory Farms. Personally I believe that industrial agriculture is the future of how food may be produced but at the same time we should still support sustainable agriculture by buying natural grown products and it also helps support farmers who have stuck to the classic way of farming.

Sources

http://www.economywatch.com/agriculture/types/industrial.html

http://eap.mcgill.ca/sustain.htm

http://www.chooseveg.ca/animal-cruelty-canada.asp

http://www.wikipedia.org/

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Designer Babies: Unethical or a step in the right direction?

          Designer babies sound exactly how you think. Design your baby. Who would have thought that we would go from designer clothing for consumer use, to designing a baby to fit how we want it to look. You would think that it would be best to leave it in the hands of God and let him decide how the baby will look but now we can do it ourselves. I’m going to look at this from both sides. On one side the benefits of designing your own baby and on the other the criticism behind doing so and how it may affect the world as we know it.

 

           The process behind a designer baby begins with an embryo being created through in-vitro fertilization. Then a single cell is removed from the embryo within 5 days of it being created. The cell is then genetically tested and from there the parents can decide whether or not they want the cell planted into the mother’s womb. The genetic selection of embryos is called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or PGD. There are a number of reasons why parents may choose to select and embryo in this way. For example to screen for diseases such as Huntingdon’s disease or Down syndrome. Another reason may be to create a healthy baby to treat a sick sibling.

 

            Now the benefits of creating a designer baby are the fact that you can screen for diseases that your family may have had in the past, so that you can make sure your child doesn’t get it when he/she is born. Another benefit of a designer baby is the fact that if you have a child who has cancer and needs a bone marrow transplant but can’t receive it from his/her parents, and then you can create a designer baby that will have the exact blood type to save your child’s life.

 

            But see that brings us to downside of designer babies, if you are going to create a designer baby just to use it to save another one of your children’s lives, then doesn’t that seem unfair for that baby? How are you going to explain to your child that he/she was born for the purpose of saving its sibling? Designer babies is also said to go against Christian beliefs because by designing your own child is kind of like playing God and realistically it would be best to leave it up to him to decide how your child may turn out. In the end I think it’s more of a decision to be made by the parents. But as long as the intentions are for the greater good of the child then I really so no problem with it. Designer babies could be a step in the right direction as far as science is concerned because this could help shape the future of human civilization. The question is will we take this discovery and try and solve the problems in our world or use it for our own benefit such as making money?  

SOURCES:

http://www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/agar.html

http://www.bionetonline.org/english/content/db_cont1.htm

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/End%20of%20the%20World/Genetics%20Nightmare/designer_babies.htm

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