Whose Life Is It Anyway?
Reason Online reminds us that government regulators of medical research and development are not our allies - their incentives are quite opposed to ours in the matter of health, responsibility and access to new medical technology. "Self defense is the most obvious and self-evident rights of men. No state can deny someone self-defense in the face of an attack. ... if the law recognizes that people have the right to defend themselves from attack by a bear or infectious bacteria, then surely they have the right to defend themselves against a rogue cancer cell. ... a patient who has exhausted standard treatments for some kind of severe disability, say, Parkinsonism, macular degeneration, or dementia, could argue that they have a right to access potentially better drugs that the FDA has not yet approved. ... Thousands died waiting for the FDA bureaucracy to let cancer drugs that would have lengthened and perhaps even saved their lives onto the market. Perhaps finding that mentally competent terminal cancer patients do have a fundamental right to access investigational drugs will finally spur the FDA to stop clinging to an outdated mid-20th century cancer clinical trial system and embrace one more suited to the 21st century science."