Medical science (WAS Why will we reach the singularity?)

From: Steve Davies (steve365@btinternet.com)
Date: Sun Mar 02 2003 - 06:16:58 MST

  • Next message: scerir: "Re: Why will we reach the singularity?"

    Joh Clark wrote

    > Medicine has to be the most disappointing science, it's been around for
    > thousands of years but until about 1900 did more harm than good with its
    > quack "cures". Even today there hasn't been a really major breakthrough
    > since the discovery of Penicillin and that was more than half a century
    ago.
    > It's surprising too; we know vastly more biology than we did then but for
    > some reason can't translate it into cures.

    I think that's more pessimistic than you need to be. The mistake is thinking
    that "medicine has been around for thousands of years". In one sense clearly
    that's true - Doctoring/surgery has been around for that time. However
    medicine as a science has only been around since about the time of Pasteur.
    Since it has to deal with the subject matter of several disciplines (Human
    biology, molecular biology, sociology, biochemistry, the biology of bacteria
    and viruses to name just a few) it's not surprising development has been
    relatively slow. There are a number of medical traditions in the various
    civilisations up to the mid19th century (the 'western' one is basically
    Galen plus some input from the Arabs) none of which are particularly
    effective. When you compare the effectiveness of scientific medicine to the
    traditional models, you become more optimistic, I feel.

    Steve Davies (Steve5@btinternet.com)



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Mar 02 2003 - 06:21:41 MST