An Alternate Brave New World

Estimates vary at this time regarding when such medications can be approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the US and put to use by the medical community. The most optimistic guesstimate is that a vaccine can come within six months. Others believe that it may not be ready before a year and a half. In the meantime, defenseless patients are suffering. There is a shortage of ventilators and masks and people are dying. The healthy ones are gripped by fear that the invisible enemy may seep into their bodies and infect them.

By the beginning of the 21^st century, technology and biology had recorded great advances. Gene therapy had offered tremendous potentials to cure or prevent illnesses thus far believed to be incurable. Despite those advances, we now realize how much there still is to learn.

This raises an inherent question whether there is a built-in self-destruct button, which has to surface at one point in the development of society to create a balance between the population growth and the means to sustain that growth. It brings to mind the Malthusian Catastrophe, a theory about the population of the earth outpacing the plant’s ability to provide food. The theory was developed by Thomas Malthus, who believed that the human population always grows faster than the food supply, until war, disease and famine reduce the population again.

Despite the failure of Malthus’ theory, many proponents of his logic have come up with similar theories.

Today, those theories do not stand up to scientific truth but they continue stirring fear into people’s minds that population growth one day will result in some global catastrophe. COVID-19 is just that kind of disease which fuels fears that humanity is at the edge of its finite existence.

Whatever used to overwhelm our lives ordinarily has become insignificant in light of this pandemic. It has become irrelevant that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in Kabul to cut a peace deal with the Talibans, nor does it interest anyone that Turkish and Russian military are monitoring Idlib jointly, to avoid another flare up. Fear and death are around us, or perhaps also, in us.

Those who believe in human ingenuity will look back and realize that every time a pandemic has threatened human existence, mankind has come up with a means of its survival, albeit at the cost of high casualties.

As the coronavirus spread from China, perhaps the Chinese adage can also bring some hope. Indeed, it is said that the word for crisis in Mandarin has two meanings: distress and opportunity. We already have experienced distress and maybe opportunity is around the corner, with many labs in the world working in overdrive and collaborating with governments that are ready to pour millions into the research and development of drugs necessary to fight the crisis.

It is also time to remember another old adage: necessity is the mother of invention.