Blog #2 - Technoscience - Syeda R

Instead of speaking on how techno-science has shaped my life, I want to talk about how it WILL shape my life. I am a pre-pharm student and have been checking out potential school to obtain my degree. One school in particular, UCSF, stood out to me as being the most innovative. During my visit, I was told about an artificial kidney being developed there. This is why I was most intrigued by UCSF: They teach us about innovations like these during the curriculum because by the time we would get our PharmD and start practicing or join a residency program, it is very likely that innovations like the artificial kidney will be highly developed or even start being used so it is important to them that we know how to handle them. Out of all the schools I visited, UCSF was the only one who had this train of thought. I am excited to learn about how techno-science will shape the future (as it has already started to) but I am also excited to learn about its limitations and implications for society.

Reading Brave New World, I started to think about what more artificial organs and health devices can mean for the world. Will the demand for human organ transplants decrease? Are they going to become more common than human organ transplants? Which is more risky? It’s interesting to think about how far we’ve come in the medical world and how much work we still want to do. And it’s interesting to think about how this is seen in the business world since medicine is largely controlled as a business. So one of my questions is: Who’s going to control it? It isn’t going to be up for the people to decide where these devices go or who needs it the most- it’s going to be up to the big guys in the corporate world but how does that make us feel? How does it make YOU feel?