I was in a meeting recently talking about ways to justify and validate my research. My research is concerning the causes, diagnosis and treatment of neurologic disorders such as stroke and traumatic brain injury. While I think that is important and that the government and people should be throwing money at me to do this critical work, the bean counters need me to justify what I do. We all need to justify our existence. So I explained to them that my research will save lots of lives. Stroke, I went on, is the third leading cause of death in the USA and leading cause of disability. Unimpressed the bean counters need dollars saved as a frame of reference to understand the benefit of my research.

Eventually the conversation and meeting ended with me writing a simple question in my notebook; “What is the Cost of Death?” and the meeting concluded. Medical research and technology development, I am well aware, turns on the dollar. I have calculated the costs of hospital stays and rehabilitation, and I have regularly quoted statistics on the numbers of lives lost and impacted concerning my research. I was not however, ready to answer a question on how much a human life is worth.

Because it is becoming necessary for me to take such questions seriously I have subsequently found out that there are well established metrics for determining the cost of death.
The simple formula is to estimate how much the person would make over their life. The medical community has “borrowed” the formulae used by lawyers, a discussion of which can be found here; http://accident-law.freeadvice.com/wrongful_death/wrongful-death-suit.htm.

A life’s value is based on our ability to earn money. So my mother who is retired and has no earning potential would have no value to her life. Is this the state of technology development and medical research in our society?

Is this where I should say, “That is just sad?” or should we be mad? If that type of rationale and calculation continues it would mean that all medical research geared to aiding institutionalized individuals, paraplegics, mentally retarded citizens and all retirees will need to be discontinued because there is no clear financial benefit from saving the lives of those people.

I for one will continue to do research to save lives as opposed to save money. There needs to a component of humanity from us humans.