Its a good day.

It's fall break for John. Which means we've been doing NOTHING since I got off work 11pm Friday.
I take that back.
We've watched the entire 5th season of House and the 1st season of Scrubs. I made a penguin out of a glove and painted some minis for our Last Night on Earth Zombie game. We've also played with little cat and had an extensive water fight that ended up soaking the bathroom and each other.

It's been good and it's only Monday.
I did have to wake up at 5 to get to the hospital though. Today was the first day of my pilot study and I wanted to make sure the shift huddles started well.

Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to.... Robert Edwards for his work on invitro fertilization. I'm sure you all know what this is, so I won't go into detail. It just seems sad to me that there is such a lag time between discoveries and the recognition for them. I guess we have to "wait and see" if a discovery is really as important as it seems before we get around to awarding people for it. I say this because the man is pretty old now, not in great health, and his partner (who probably would have shared the prize) has already died.

The ethics section on Wikipedia's IVF thread is very interesting. Sometimes I think people make up issues where they don't exist just so they can hear themselves speak. Such as the Catholic Church's argument that IVF is a separation of the marital act and therefore an immoral way to conceive children. It opposes "Natural Law," (to which my husband griped, "If it couldn't happen then it WOULDN'T happen.")

This brings up an interesting (and I feel unrelated point, but I'm going there anyway.) in the current book I'm reading (Hitler's Scientists) the argument is made that scientists are there to discover and explain things. They should not be morally bound or ethically responsible for how their discoveries are then utilized. There are so many comic book villains suffering from this it's not even funny.
Then there are real people.

So what's the thing? Invent and let others use to destroy? Or keep it to yourself and hope no one else figures it out? You can't control how people use your data. Maybe we should all just curl up in little balls and hide inside so no one can discover anything and no one can cause harm.
On the other hand, how will we ever learn to do good? How can we learn what feels good if we never get hurt?
Wow, too deep for 2:15 on a Monday...

I say knowledge is power. Do the most good for the most people. I don't think scientists can figure out every possibility that their discoveries can be used for. What if they mean well, but it is utilized for bad? Who gets the fault? He guy who invented the gun or the one holding it? Come on now. But, I know things are not that black and white.

How did we get from the Nobel Prize to Oppenheimer? The guy never won a Nobel Prize.

This does remind me of the time in high school when I memorized all the Nobel Prize winners, years and contributions. Phew. Like I said, I like to stalk scientists. Especially dead ones.


Also, a clown was just voted into office in Brazil. It seems he won, by a lot.