Science Saves Lives

Even at its best, pre-modern medical practice did not save many. Queen Anne was the last Stuart monarch of Great Britain. In the last seventeen years of the seventeenth century, she was pregnant eighteen times. Only five children were born alive. Only one of them survived infancy. He died before reaching adulthood, and before her coronation in 1702. There seems to be no evidence of some genetic disorder. She had the best medical care money could buy.

Diseases that once tragically carried off countless infants and children have been progressively mitigated and cured by science - through the discovery of the microbial world, via the insight that physicians and midwives should wash their hands and sterilize their instruments, through nutrition, public health and sanitation measures, antibiotics, drugs, vaccines, the uncovering of the molecular structure of DNA, molecular biology, and now gene therapy. In the developed world at least, parents today have an enormously better chance of seeing their children live to adulthood than did the heir to the throne of one of the most powerful nations on Earth in the late seventeenth century. Smallpox has been wiped out worldwide. The area of our planet infested with malariacarrying mosquitoes has dramatically shrunk. The number of years a child diagnosed with leukaemia can expect to live has been increasing progressively, year by year. Science permits the Earth to feed about a hundred times more humans, and under conditions much less grim, than it could a few thousand years ago.

We can pray over the cholera victim, or we can give her 500 milligrams of tetracycline every twelve hours. (There is still a religion, Christian Science, that denies the germ theory of disease; if prayer fails, the faithful would rather see their children die than give them antibiotics.) We can try nearly futile psychoanalytic talk therapy on the schizophrenic patient, or we can give him 300 to 500 milligrams a day of chlozapine. The scientific treatments are hundreds or thousands of times more effective than the alternatives. (And even when the alternatives seem to work, we don't actually know that they played any role: spontaneous remissions, even of cholera and schizophrenia, can occur without prayer and without psychoanalysis.) Abandoning science means abandoning much more than air conditioning, CD players, hair dryers and fast cars.

In hunter-gatherer, pre-agricultural times, the human life expectancy was about 20 to 30 years. That's also what it was in Western Europe in Late Roman and in Medieval times. It didn't rise to 40 years until around the year 1870. It reached 50 in 1915, 60 in 1930, 70 in 1955, and is today approaching 80 (a little more for women, a little less for men). The rest of the world is retracing the European increment in longevity. What is the cause of this stunning, unprecedented, humanitarian transition? The germ theory of disease, public health measures, medicines and medical technology. Longevity is perhaps the best single measure of the physical quality of life. (If you're dead, there's little you can do to be happy.) This is a precious offering from science to humanity - nothing less than the gift of life.

You can pray over a sick person, or give them medicine. All the ways medical science has reduced mortality.