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I certainly do get the sense that medical progress has stalled. Perhaps all the "low hanging fruit" has been picked and future progress will be much harder. As

by spikels 14y ago

I certainly do get the sense that medical progress has stalled. Perhaps all the "low hanging fruit" has been picked and future progress will be much harder. As the article mentions antibiotics were both a lot easier to develop and had a much bigger impact than genomic research - at least so far. It sure seems like we have made very little overall progress even on targeted diseases, such as cancer, despite vastly increased spending. Spending on both healthcare and healthcare research have roughly doubled in nominal dollars since 2000 with little overall impact. I understand that, at least in the US, healthcare is fundamentally broken - results have little connection to costs. But is this enough to be holding back the entire economy? Is tech's impact really just smaller than we think? And are other sectors, especially government activites, also lagging behind and thus dragging down overall performance?

krapp 14y ago
Perhaps all the "low hanging fruit" had been picked and future progress will be much harder. I think that might have something to do with it. Maybe there's only so far you can go in reducing the cost or complexity of some of the problems medicine has to solve now, or maybe the money in research goes first to the treatments which turn the biggest profit for hospitals? Also I wonder whether the progress in the tech sector isn't just more visible than progress in medicine. It's a lot easier to see the way the iPod has iterated over a decade than, say, to see the way genetic screening has. Though of course medicine and tech are inextricably linked, maybe it would be better to say 'medical tech' versus 'consumer tech.' And of course there's the issues of religion and politics. If we could say, clone ready-made human organs for transplant, just handwaving away the 'growing them' part, how long would the technology be held back by public and political squeamishness about the process itself? If it requires something akin to industrial, mass-production of living human tissues and stem cells? Even if it saved a million lives tomorrow, it might take decades to pass into a level of public tolerance that makes it politically acceptable to fund the research.
nnq 14y ago
> Perhaps all the "low hanging fruit" had been picked and future progress will be much harder. Yes, it will be, but "much harder" doesn't have to mean that it will "take more time". Most problems in medicine are starting to look like engineering problems, though at the nano-scale. This is bad, because you can't just "pick fruits", ie. make serendipitous discoveries that have great impact, but it's also good, because in an "engineering field", once you get past a certain point, let's call it the "transistor point", things can start moving very fast result-wise. Unfortunately medicine is very much somewhere at the "steam-engine point", maybe even below it, in a grey zone of slow progress and we don't really know how much this "grey zone" will last. Maybe it's just waiting for the physicists and chemists to come up with cool nanothech, maybe not...
tsotha 14y ago
>I certainly do get the sense that medical progress has stalled. I think that's a mistaken impression. There are hundreds of new drugs you've never heard of because you don't need them. I'm on the other end - I'd be dead already but for a drug invented in the '90s. The fact that we haven't cured cancer is more because cancer is a really, really tough problem than because there's anything fundamentally wrong with the way we're going about attacking it. We understand cancer at the genetic and biochemical level much better than we did even ten years ago. Understand it well enough, that is, to realize we completely underestimated the depth of the problem. But understanding is progress, even if it doesn't mean cures are imminent. You can't take what was probably the most productive period in medical history and say "See, everything is broken because the hits aren't coming as fast as they did when sulphas and antibiotics were discovered."

by spikels 14y ago

krapp 14y ago

Perhaps all the "low hanging fruit" had been picked and future progress will be much harder. I think that might have something to do with it. Maybe there's only so far you can go in reducing the cost or complexity of some of the problems medicine has to solve now, or maybe the money in research goes first to the treatments which turn the biggest profit for hospitals? Also I wonder whether the progress in the tech sector isn't just more visible than progress in medicine. It's a lot easier to see the way the iPod has iterated over a decade than, say, to see the way genetic screening has. Though of course medicine and tech are inextricably linked, maybe it would be better to say 'medical tech' versus 'consumer tech.' And of course there's the issues of religion and politics. If we could say, clone ready-made human organs for transplant, just handwaving away the 'growing them' part, how long would the technology be held back by public and political squeamishness about the process itself? If it requires something akin to industrial, mass-production of living human tissues and stem cells? Even if it saved a million lives tomorrow, it might take decades to pass into a level of public tolerance that makes it politically acceptable to fund the research.

nnq 14y ago

> Perhaps all the "low hanging fruit" had been picked and future progress will be much harder. Yes, it will be, but "much harder" doesn't have to mean that it will "take more time". Most problems in medicine are starting to look like engineering problems, though at the nano-scale. This is bad, because you can't just "pick fruits", ie. make serendipitous discoveries that have great impact, but it's also good, because in an "engineering field", once you get past a certain point, let's call it the "transistor point", things can start moving very fast result-wise. Unfortunately medicine is very much somewhere at the "steam-engine point", maybe even below it, in a grey zone of slow progress and we don't really know how much this "grey zone" will last. Maybe it's just waiting for the physicists and chemists to come up with cool nanothech, maybe not...

tsotha 14y ago

>I certainly do get the sense that medical progress has stalled. I think that's a mistaken impression. There are hundreds of new drugs you've never heard of because you don't need them. I'm on the other end - I'd be dead already but for a drug invented in the '90s. The fact that we haven't cured cancer is more because cancer is a really, really tough problem than because there's anything fundamentally wrong with the way we're going about attacking it. We understand cancer at the genetic and biochemical level much better than we did even ten years ago. Understand it well enough, that is, to realize we completely underestimated the depth of the problem. But understanding is progress, even if it doesn't mean cures are imminent. You can't take what was probably the most productive period in medical history and say "See, everything is broken because the hits aren't coming as fast as they did when sulphas and antibiotics were discovered."