> 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

> 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...