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Timely war on want

A pledge by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga to lighten the cost of living burden of the people within the next three weeks or raise the salaries and wages of State sector employees, is bound to bring relief to many a troubled heart in this country.

The UPFA Government's first budget proposals due to be presented in Parliament next month - the President promises - would be a pro-people one, which will aim at providing wide-ranging relief to the masses.

While this doesn't mean that welfare expenditure would be raised to unrealistic heights at the next budget or that popular relief measures would take the place of investment expenditure in productive sectors of the economy, what it does unambiguously highlight is the Government's keen concern for the well-being of the people.

After all, people need to be brought to the centre of development and minus a well thought out strategy to empower the people and make them economically independent, development plans would come to nought. So, the Government's emerging budget proposals could be said to be having the correct focus.

Meanwhile, the correct perspective needs to be placed on the current economic problems of the country, for, a correct diagnosis of our ills would lead to a sound prescription for their elimination.

Since our's is not a closed economy, external economic factors are bound to impinge on local conditions and aggravate them. The "oil shock" is one such factor and it is, no doubt, a chief contributory factor to the current cost of living convulsions.

However, this is not the "whole story" as far as the local economy goes. What aggravates the cost of living burden is also decelerating production and stepped-down investment activity.

In short, stepped-up local production of essential goods and services is the key to relief from the cost of living anxiety. An atrophied economy, it should be always remembered, would invariably breed a spate of ills - both material and otherwise.

We warmly welcome the Government's grand development program - the 'Sanwardena Sangramaya' which is the correct path to take.

However, the success of this program needs to be postulated on an all out war on poverty and want, which, in turn hinges on the sacrificial efforts of both rulers and ruled to raise production of essential goods and services, with least dependence on external sources.

The Government and its officials in particular need to bear in mind that they should lead from the front in this war on want. A degree of self-sacrificial simplicity and austerity is expected of them.

Bionic beings

We don't realise it, but there are 206 bones of all sizes and shapes in the human body. It is only when we suffer a broken bone that we realise the fundamental importance of the skeletal system to our very lives. Bones do mend after a fracture, but the process gets slower as we head into the twilight years. Sometimes, bones are permanently damaged, resulting in lifelong misery.

But now there's renewed hope for such sufferers thanks to the efforts of a group of Swiss medical researchers. They have achieved encouraging results with a pioneering synthetic material that could replace missing or damaged bones and allow the original bone tissue to grow back in its place.

The team from Lausanne's university hospital and the Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) said the porous but solid material developed over the past three years could be used for patients who have had bone tumours removed or suffered accidents or deformities.

Laboratory tests using fragments of human bone had shown that bone cells colonised the material over three to four weeks and started multiplying. Its clinical use on humans is at least five years away, if the project moves on successfully.

These results are indeed very encouraging not only for the medical fraternity but also for the patients because the new material could provide an alternative to painful and uncertain bone tissue transplants.

This shows that specialists from seemingly different areas - composite materials and medicine in this case - can work together to achieve results that benefit humanity in the end. This joint effort has created a polymer-ceramic material that combines both structural and biological properties.

This also raises the spectre of half-human, half-machine beings as graphically illustrated by the cult TV series Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman.

It seemed a distant prospect when they were aired a couple of decades ago, but scientists are getting there faster than anyone estimated.

Nature may still reign supreme, but Man is learning to mimic it and even surpass it. Fifty years from now, artificial bones will be so advanced that they will perfectly match the original version and perform far better. The same goes for other body parts that can be artificially manufactured.

This is good news for the differently abled persons who have been deprived of the use of one or more of the senses or limbs. For example, medical technologists are already working on artificial eyes for the visually challenged. Technology will certainly help us see the light of day in more ways than one.

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