A decade to forget? No, remember Viagra, the iPod and the death of good manners

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

It’s tempting to label the Noughties ‘the decade to forget’, except that we only get about eight decades each, so it doesn’t really seem wise to forget any of them. It was certainly a decade of nasty shocks — 9/11, the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 — and of nasty wars and bad politics, beginning with George W. Bush’s disputed election and ending with Gordon Brown’s disintegration before our very eyes. It was a decade of financial madness that began with the bursting of the dotcom bubble and ended with half our high-street banks under state control and our public finances in ruins. And yet it was also a decade of remarkable progress in so many aspects of our daily lives.

What would you pick as the greatest scientific or technological advance of the past decade? For some, the answer might be the text message, developed in the early 1990s but not adopted as a national habit until the turn of the millennium. For others it might be Viagra, which first became available by NHS prescription in 1999 — though if you’ve been popping the blue pills daily since then, you probably need a decade’s rest by now. And there are other new drugs which have worked wonders without provoking pensioner promiscuity: one such is Lucentis, first approved in the UK in 2007 as a treatment for advancing blindness caused by age-related macular degeneration.

As consumer gadget of the decade, many will cite the iPod, designed for Apple by Chingford-born Jonathan Ive and launched in 2001, though you might argue that it is merely an elegant improvement on the 30-year-old concept of the Sony Walkman; the multi-functional iPhone, about to celebrate its third birthday, is altogether more revolutionary.