Dial 111 ; it is 99.9% times certain that a  nurse or an ambulance will appear within a few minutes along with a paramedic and an EMT. (emergency medical technician)

Although some of you may have had the bad experience of waiting for hours and hours for a consultation at our hospitals, medical technology is advancing at a phenomenal pace.

Although the authorities seem to be blind to this, there is a simple solution. Start more medical schools to train more doctors and other medical staff. Human resources are available, and Aotearoa has the funds.

Now let us consider some of the advances in the field of medicine around the world and consider some of the implications.

The first shock was when thirty-five years ago, surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant on a human being in South Africa. (This was a greater shock than that of Socrates in the 5th century.) In 1996 Dolly the sheep was successfully cloned by fusing the nucleus from a mammary-gland cell of an ewe into an egg cell taken from a Scottish ewe in the womb of another Scottish ewe, This was the first mammal to be cloned, not from a cell taken from embryos, but from an adult cell. This was the case of the birth of an organism without fertilisation. A child may come from a mother without a father.

 Well, what is next? Arthur C Clerk has even predicted immortality. This picture makes us ponder over the complications that may arise along with these medical advancements. It shows babies growing up in artificial wombs. At the moment this method is used for premature babies.  A premature baby is a baby born before the 37th week of pregnancy.  As the famous visionary J B S Haldane says in another half a century, there can be a bloom of parentless babies. No mother to breastfeed and only a machine to hug.

 Imagine the repercussions. There can be factory production of babies like farming pigs and sheep. There can be a breed of special ‘Homo sapiencis slaves’.

By Upali Salpadoru – Wellington