Biomed device company turns to defense

Some companies, as we’ve written recently, are benefiting big-time from the U.S. government’s obsession with defense against terrorists. Some of them might even change their names to include “defense” in order to take advantage of the boom in government support dollars. A northeast Ohio device company, formerly called Interwoven Technologies and now known as Stargate Defense Systems Corp, is another recipient of the Department of Defense’s largesse. They just received “$1.27 million to explore the feasibility of developing a handheld machine that would detect harmful chemicals, such as nerve or mustard gas, in drinking water.”

The good thing about this is that the end results of these negative-energy research projects (let’s face it–it’s hard to think of devoting your energy and your resources to defending against horrible things you think other people will do to you as anything but negative) will be adaptable to helping the human race in many other ways.

I once attended a class, for example, with a psychologist from Kenya who said, far from worrying about advanced mental health issues, many people in his country still have to be taught not to drink from the polluted waters in which they also defecate and bathe.

So if we can learn to detect bad stuff in water (no matter why we decided to learn it), maybe we can use that discovery to help raise the standard of living for others in our world…let’s hope sooner rather than later.