Competition; Is There Anything It Can’t Do
Scientists have made ordinary human skin cells take on the chameleon-like powers of embryonic stem cells, a startling breakthrough that might someday deliver the medical payoffs of embryo cloning without the controversy.
Laboratory teams on two continents report success in a pair of landmark papers released Tuesday. It’s a neck-and-neck finish to a race that made headlines five months ago, when scientists announced that the feat had been accomplished in mice.
Hell, competition even overcomes the moronic federal regulations of stem cells. To think some of you want to regulate the competitive force of free markets.
November 20th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Actually I think you’ve just proven my point. I’ve always maintained that proper government regulation can be used to shift the goal towards which free market agents are competing, without inhibiting that competition. This is a perfect example- instead of competing really hard to come up with cures involving stem cells, regulations forced free market agents to compete really hard in order to come up with a new way to get stem cells without breaking the regulations.
Obviously this is a case where the regulation was stupid, but it does prove that if there were regulations which, say, made it more profitable for a company to find a cure for cancer than to find a highly marketable designer weight-loss drug, then we could still see the full, undiminished force of free-market competition turned towards finding that cure for cancer.