The Borders of Science

Surely something as universally true as science could not have borders?  Not in the twenty-first century.  Not in the age of the internet.

Like the refugees who face immense challenges in getting into Fortress Europe, getting the benefits of science to the poor in developing countries is incredibly difficult.

The most well-known case was that of aids drugs and their availability to the poor in developing countries.  The problem is this:  the systems created to protect intellectual property simply ignores the existence of the poor who could never pay for drugs, priced at around US$17,000 for an annual supply.  

While developed countries were able to pay the price for aids drugs and the systems necessary to treat it, developing were not.  The AIDs pandemic has thus largely become a pandemic for the poor.  Like the Black Plague of previous centuries, it has swept through countries and devastated their populations.

The following graph shows the impact in Uganda and countries of southern Africa. 

Life expectancy collapsed to the levels of colonial times.  Aids campaigners including Amy Kapzynski and Doctors without Borders campaigned successfully to bring the price down (within the reach of development organisations), but that has not been a complete solution.   Poverty still denies access to doctors and medical facilities and death continues – at an estimated 2,000,000 deaths per year.

In 1948 visionary men and women imagined a world in which all people would share in the benefits of science, and they wrote the idea into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

Everyone has the right … to share in scientific advancement

In our world of borders, the vision remains only that.  Some of us live in pre-modern squallor.  Others of us enjoy a technological age unimaginable to our forbears.  Is this another dimension of foreignness?  That science itself can be effectively confined behind national borders?   Beyond access to technology, what of access to education?