News broke recently about a German doctor who claims to have rid his patient of HIV with a bone marrow transplant.
The patient, who was also afflicted with leukemia, received the transplant from a donor with a genetic resistance to CCR5, a receptor the AIDS virus uses to infiltrate cells. Twenty months after the procedure, no trace of HIV could be found in the patient. Fine news indeed for researchers studying gene therapy as a treatment for AIDS.
Now follow this:
Reports are also circling about the resurgence of a new, vicious strain of tuberculosis called TB-XDR (extensively drug-resistant) which is essentially untreatable. Ironically, we could have eradicated TB years ago, at the cost of about $20 per person.
Sounds reasonable enough, right? Only in reality, that number was functionally prohibitive. 3rd-world countries didn't have it; 1st-world countries wouldn't give it. So we let tuberculosis incubate, until it mutated into the XDR strain that now threatens a global pandemic.
So what's my point?
My point is that gene therapy is expensive. Really expensive. An HIV cure will likely never be available for as little as $20 per person. And yet even if it were (as TB's history proves), we still wouldn't pay it. There's simply not enough money.
The new Global Trends 2025 report predicts that within two decades, global living conditions will have become catastrophic. I should say "more catastrophic," as the majority of people on this planet already live in miserable poverty.
Sure, there's a disparity of wealth between countries and continents. But that misses the point. Even if we were to divide up all the world's resources equally among the current population, there wouldn't be enough. And that's the population--now. Imagine 20 more years of exponential growth.
Human overpopulation isn't our biggest problem. It's our only problem.
While we profligately pump funding into medical research and energy, we ignore the fact that regardless of technology, the planet simply cannot sustain the growing masses. But what can we do? Human life is sacred. Reproduction is our evolutionary driver.
I don't have the solution. But I do know the problem:
The many have doomed the few.