Abstract
Nicholas Rescher in “Moral Issues Relating to the Economics of New Knowledge in the Biomedical Sciences” [6] and Richard Zaner in his “Only the Best is Good Enough?” [8] call the pursuit of medical progress into question. Rescher tells us that as progress and advancements are realized in science and medicine, there is a marked increase in the over-all resource cost of realizing new scientific findings. Presuming such an inexorable and intractable trend, Rescher is impelled to ask these “very difficult and uncomfortable” moral questions ([6], p. 42).
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1.
Given the economics of research, should there be a deployment from research to therapy?
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2.
Should we redeploy resources from complex and expansive high-technology intervention to a lower level technology and, above all, to preventive medicine?
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3.
Should we abandon the prevailing moral precept that “Only the very best is good enough?”
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© 1982 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Gardell, M.A. (1982). The Best is Yet to Come. In: Bondeson, W.B., Tristram Engelhardt, H., Spicker, S.F., White, J.M. (eds) New Knowledge in the Biomedical Sciences. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7723-5_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7723-5_15
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