Peter Singer’s book called The Life You Can Save is about one of his most famous thought experiments: Suppose on a walk you notice a young girl drowning in a lake. If you can swim, and you can save her…
Blog Archives
Do we have a responsibility to develop more millionaire superheroes?
Posted in Millionaire Superheroes, Philosophy and ethics
Maurice Hilleman, millionaire superhero
Almost nobody has heard of Maurice Hilleman, but everyone should know his name. As Radiolab said, “his work is estimated to save about 8 million lives a year… he was the greatest scientist of the 20th century… We live longer…
Posted in Millionaire Superheroes
The biggest health achievement in the United States in the last half century?
Kristof @ NYT: Let’s break for a quiz: What was the biggest health care breakthrough in the last 40 years in the United States? Heart bypasses? CAT scans and M.R.I.’s? New cancer treatments? No, it was the cigarette tax. Every…
Posted in Health, Millionaire Superheroes
Millionaire Superheroes: the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
Justin Rowlatt at The BBC celebrates the 50th birthday of IR8, a strain of rice developed by the IRRI in the Philippines that more than doubled rice productivity. It is thought that IR8 saved many millions of lives and transformed…
Posted in Development, Millionaire Superheroes
Millionaire Superheros: Henry Heimlich
Henry Heimlich’s biggest innovation is famous: the Heimlich maneuver for saving people from choking. The Deaconess Institute estimates it has saved 50,000 lives in the US and since the US is less than 5% of world population, it is likely that…
Posted in Millionaire Superheroes
Unmasking Millionaire Superheroes: Nils Bohlin
Dylan Matthews at VOX shows a graph from the WHO that the trend of rising life expectancy has been continuing since 1990: Life expectancy has been rising fastest in low income countries which have the lowest life expectancy, but average life…
Posted in Millionaire Superheroes
The most important medical advance of the past century
Antibiotics revolutionized medicine, but it is likely that no single antibiotic caused as big of a drop in deaths as a simple over-the-counter medicine that you have probably taken it at some point without appreciating how revolutionary it is. It…
Medianism 