A big story of 2025
Although 2025 was, in Edward Gibbon’s words, ‘a register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind,’ with the usual acts of terror and mass murder, earthquakes, floods and wildfires, one of the biggest stories was not about politics or nature, but about science.
The roll-put of Ozempic and the weight-loss drugs has given us for the first time a means of tacking the rise of obesity and diabetes which were so detrimental to health. It was a technical solution created by human ingenuity and, one might add, by the creative forces of companies seeking to make profits by meeting human wants and needs.
Where exhortations and behavioural changes sought by government taxes on sugars, fats and fizzy drinks failed to dent the problem, despite ever-increasing coercion, a scientific breakthrough by private companies has delivered the results. The new drugs are already bringing down diabetes and the health problems associated with obesity.
The ASI has long advocated over the years the development of technical solutions to problems, ones that enable us to solve them without becoming people we are not. Sandal-wearers and bland-food lobbyists want us to live more simply denying ourselves any pleasures that have a downside, but greater success is achieved by technical breakthroughs that enable people to enjoy their pleasures without picking up the tab of adverse consequences.
It isn’t Cromwell and it isn’t Puritan, but it delivers the goods. Decades of anti-smoking crackdowns achieved nothing like the success that vaping has brought to reducing the harm from cigarette smoke. It is principally the smoke that brings the health problems, so vapes and pouches that bring the pleasure without the smoke constitute a real health advance. Blind opposition to tobacco or nicotine seem to miss the point that the smoke is the big menace.
Those who seek to move us around like pieces on a chess board, and to make us live as they think we should, rather than as we wish to live, will not be pleased by technological innovations that deny them those opportunities. But they go with the grain of human nature. And they succeed.
Madsen Pirie