Ronald Bailey
The liberal NGO InLiberty.ru and Esquire Russia magazine have invited me to lecture in a series that looks at alternatives to our social realities. In my case, I will be describing how medicine and physicians gained so much social, political, and economic power of the past century and half. Among other things, I will describe how the American Medical Association was instrumental in criminalizing abortion the mid-19th century; how they gained prescribing power as an early salvo in the century-long War on Drugs; the eugenic justification for compulsory sterilization of undesireables; the declaration of homosexuality as a "sociopathic personality disturbance" that needed medical treatment; and the Soviet political abuse of psychiatry.
I will then turn to how technologies are unfettering us from the centralized medical-industrial complex including IBM's Watson cognitive computing as ubiquitous diagnostician and treatment counselor; the power of open source sharing of genetic information; the immense promise of CRISPR gene editing; the Tricorder X Prize; home doctor visits via telemedicine; the proliferation of wearable medical sensors; and the speed up of clinical trials using health apps like those in Apple's new Research Kit.
If you're in Moscow today (March 24) I will be speaking at the DI Telegraph Building just blocks from the Kremlin at 8:00 pm. On March 25, I will be talking in St. Petersburg at the WEAVERS creative space at 8:00 pm. On Friday, March 27, I will be at the Fedoriv Hub in Kiev, Ukraine. Go to InLiberty.ru to register. See you there.
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