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My name is Mary Warnock and I'm a member of the
House of Lords.
And my work is in philosophy.
Well my greatest hope for the future is that
the developments that are already started
in stem cell research
will go on so that a lot of
conditions that now actually make peoples life
very difficult
can be remedied. Now I know there are awful hazards in
the use of, the idea of cell replacement.
But it seems to me that
there'd be a huge advance if
stem cells
could be
used
as replacement
for damaged cells
in areas like
spinal injury
and particularly the very common
that I personally suffer from
which is a age-related
macular degeneration.
My greatest fear for the future is not really a fear, it's just a rather
gloomy prediction
that actually
the human race will
die out
eventually. And that just makes me sad,
it doesn't fill me with alarm and panic.
I think
we shall in a hundred years time have
of necessity
changed our attitude
to death.
We've already changed our attitude to birth and I think death will come next.
And I believe that in a hundred years attitudes will have changed
and that
we shall find that people,
not just people who are terminally ill
though they as well,
but people who just think they're too old to bother to go on,
will be enabled to
commit suicide
or even have help to die. So that's one of the changes that
I think will have happened in a hundred years and I should very much welcome.
I'd like it to happen now.