Medical hypotheses
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Editorial
The future of 'pure' medical science: the need for a new specialist professional research system.
Over recent decades, medical research has become mostly an 'applied' science which implicitly aims at steady progress by an accumulation of small improvements, each increment having a high probability of validity. Applied medical science is, therefore, a social system of communications for generating pre-publication peer-reviewed knowledge that is ready for implementation. However, the need for predictability makes modern medical science risk-averse and this is leading to a decline in major therapeutic breakthroughs where new treatments for new diseases are required. ⋯ Pure medical science would work most effectively and efficiently if practiced in many independent and competing institutions in several different countries. The main 'market' for pure medical science would be the applied medical scientists, who need radical strategies to solve problems which are not yielding to established methods. The stimulus to create such elite pure medical science institutions might come from the leadership of academic 'entrepreneurs' (for instance, imaginative patrons in the major funding foundations), or be triggered by a widespread public recognition of the probable exhaustion of existing applied medical science approaches to solving major therapeutic challenges.