From: pjf (pjfraser_at_mac.com)
Date: Tue Apr 19 2005 - 09:04:13 PDT
i used to work at one of the US national research laboratories. we had a big old cyclotron (the Bevatron), which had been state of the art when built in the 1950s, but had been outpaced by several newer more powerful machines. however, it had some unique capabilities and was able to generate certain beams that were unique.
and a couple of those beams were the only way to eradicate certain types of brain tumors. so for the last 10 years of operation, that big old beast saved about 10 lives per year. not much other work of note was done there during that period, but others did also use it.
its operational budget was around five million dollars per year. in the early 90s the republicans took over the congress and slashed budgets. they forced the lab to shut down the Bevatron, and in doing so placed a value of about $500,000 on a human life. now THAT's quite a business decision.
http://www.acme.com/jef/photos/bevatron.html
at the end of the day, it's all dollars and cents, like it or not. and if newton had lived, would apple have survived? sometimes we have to lose good things to be able to keep other even better things. imagine how awful daily life would be if the only OS you could use was windows or linux?
On Tuesday, April 19, 2005, at 08:08AM, Paul Curtis (Nations One Mortgage) <MicroSSG_at_Comcast.net> wrote:
>Thanks Ed for going beyond the emotions and describing in more detail the
>impact.
>
>I was also in the process of building a medical monitoring and documentation
>platform business based on the Newton... Ego has a large and ever-reaching impact.
>
>Yeah, still bitter.
-- Peter
pjfraser_at_mac.com
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