Looking out from my sitting-room window here I can see the University of Bath on the hill on the other side of the city and from there last night came the news that one of their biological researchers has been able to change pancreas cells into liver cells. This has been done in vitro but the researcher thinks that it will be another ten years before cells will be able to be re-engineered in situ. This is another reminder that a new era is almost upon us when life will be able to be lengthened significantly.
But how widely available will these new techniques be? Will there have to be a rationing system in free national health services -- or indeed in private ones? And will there be enough specialists able to cope with demand? Secret Government proposals to overturn the principle of a free NHS and limiting its services were headlined in The Independent yesterday, but no further news has appeared today. This will take the reform (or the deconstruction) of the NHS a lot further than even I anticipated in various postings to FW in recent months. However, of more relevance to FW is the matter of the supply of the specialist staff that modern society increasingly requires. I've mentioned previously that most of the highest quality physics papers published in America are written by naturalised Americans who were born and largely educated abroad. England needs to import thousands of doctors and nurses educated from abroad and our state schools are deeply deficient in teachers of mathematics and scientific subjects. Big changes are being made in immigration policies at the present time to attract skilled people. Canada appears to need thousands of foreign doctors, too. Germany and France are finding themselves short of scientists and other high skills. It would seem that the 'developed' countries can no longer supply enough of the high skills that they need. Increasingly, they have to entice the cream of medical and scientific personnel from under-developed countries. This is certainly exploitation. To my mind, this is an infinitely more serious problem than the sort of trade and investment exploitation that the anti-globalisers campaign about. One particular example of this came up the other day on the radio when a BBC correspondent, having recently returned to Argentina after an absence of a few years, reported that many of his contacts -- professionals, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs -- were no longer around. They had emigrated to America or Europe. This phenomenon, plus what appears to be the consolidation of a new sort of underclass in all the developed countries from which their young people cannot escape into normal society, strengthens my belief that an hour-glass employment structure is taking shape. Society is pulling itself apart. The increasing growth of spectator sport and low quality mass entertainment is reminiscent of the bread and circus era in the last centuries of the Roman Empire. A very serious situation is developing. The rapid growth of private education in what is still a nominally communist country, China, means that they might escape the yawning skills gap of West Europe and North America. I'm sorry to raise this matter again on FW but substantial reforms of our state education and welfare systems seems to me to be the only possible solution. As presently constituted, they are only consolidating and deepening a dual society. Keith Hudson __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
