Blog

Apr 16, 2024 1 min read Blog

Inventions That Have Saved Billions of Lives

I was looking for estimates of how many lives have been saved by vaccines and came across this excellent article. The other inventions that rank as high as vaccines include blood transfusions, synthetic fertilizers, and toilets. The graphic visualization is also very cool.

“For most of civilized history, life expectancy fluctuated in the 30 to 40 year range…By the 20th century, an explosion in new technologies, treatments, and other science-backed practices helped to increase global life expectancy at an unprecedented rate…What were the major innovations that made the last century so very fruitful in saving lives?

These discoveries saved billions of lives | World Economic Forum

Apr 15, 2024 1 min read Blog

Elementary Students in Canada Discover EpiPens Are Useless in Space

Using a NASA program that partners with university researchers, a group of elementary students were invited to test an idea of their own. Not even NASA knew that EpiPens become useless in space. I love stories like this.

(Via the excellent Legal Nomads newsletter)

Students from St. Brother André Elementary School’s Program for Gifted Learners (PGL) were interested in the effects of cosmic radiation on the molecular structure of epinephrine, a medication found in EpiPens used in emergencies to treat severe allergic reactions. The PGL students had their experiment accepted by the Cubes in Space program, meaning that it was sent into space with NASA. The John Holmes Mass Spectrometry Core Facility in the uOttawa’s Faculty of Science analyzed the returned samples to find the epinephrine sent into space returned only 87% pure, with the remaining 13% transformed into extremely poisonous benzoic acid derivatives, making the EpiPen unusable.

Story: uOttowa

Apr 12, 2024 1 min read Blog

You Can’t Buy Virtue

Most people agree that there are things money shouldn’t be able to buy. Making everything a market has the potential to disrupt our virtuous instincts. Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has written extensively on this topic, but this piece of his is an engaging explanation.

“If the supply of altruism, generosity, and civic virtue is fixed, like the supply of fossil fuels, then we should try to conserve it…But to those not steeped in economics, this way of thinking about the generous virtues is strange, even far-fetched. It ignores the possibility that our capacity for love and benevolence is not depleted with use but enlarged with practice.”

How Markets Crowd Out Morals - Boston Review

Apr 11, 2024 1 min read Blog

How to Avoid Making Things Worse When You’re Trying to Do Good

It’s too easy when you want to help that you actually make things worse. This article should be required reading for anyone who is setting out to have an impact on the world. It’s long, but well structured and easy to follow, with a handy table of contents. The six risks named are excellently chosen.

“So if you’re going to try to have an impact, and especially if you’re going to be ambitious about it, it’s very important to carefully consider how you might accidentally make things worse.”

Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them | 80,000 Hours

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