Medical hypotheses
-
Most research is 'normal science' using Thomas Kuhn's term: checking, trial-and-error improvement and incremental extrapolation of already existing paradigms. By contrast, 'revolutionary science' changes the fundamental structures of science by making new theories, discoveries or technologies. Science Nobel prizes (in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine and Economics) have the potential to be used as a new metric for measuring revolutionary science. ⋯ Although Nobel science prizes are sporadically won by numerous nations and institutions, it seems that long term national strength in revolutionary science is mainly a result of sustaining and newly-generating multi-Nobel-winning research centres. At present these elite institutions are found almost exclusively in the USA. The USA is apparently the only nation with a research system that nurtures revolutionary science on a large scale.
-
Editorial
Mega-prizes in medicine: big cash awards may stimulate useful and rapid therapeutic innovation.
Following Horrobin's suggestion of 1986, I argue that offering very large prizes (tens of millions of US dollars, or more) for solving specific therapeutic problems, would be an excellent strategy for promoting the rapid development of effective new treatments. The two mainstream ways of paying for medical research are funding the process with grants or funding the outcome via patent protection. When grants are used to fund the process of research the result tends to be 'pure' science, guided by intrinsic scientific objectives. ⋯ For example, medical charities focused on specific diseases should consider accumulating their resources until they can offer a mega-prize for solving a clinical problem of special concern to their patients. Prize money should be big enough to pay for the research and development, the evaluation of the new treatment in a clinical trial, and with a large profit left-over to compensate for the intrinsic risk of competing. Sufficiently large amounts of money, and the prestige and publicity derived from winning a mega-prize, could rapidly mobilize research efforts to discover a whole range of scientifically un-glamorous but clinically-useful therapeutic breakthroughs.
-
People often suggest that scientists should have a specific personality type, usually conscientious and self-critical. But this is a mistake. Science as a social system needs to be conscientious and self-critical, but scientists as people do not necessarily have to conform to that stereotype. ⋯ But the modern science superstar is more like the Nutty Professor's alter ego, nightclub singer 'Buddy Love': a sharp-suited, good-looking and charismatic charmer. While Nutty was dull but impartial, Buddy is compelling but self-seeking. Our attitude towards public scientific pronouncements should be adjusted accordingly.
-
The mid-20th century saw the rise of the boy-genius, probably because a personality type characterized by prolonged youthfulness is advantageous both in science and modern life generally. This is the evolution of 'psychological neoteny', in which ever-more people retain for ever-longer the characteristic behaviours and attitudes of earlier developmental stages. Whereas traditional societies are characterized by initiation ceremonies marking the advent of adulthood, these have now dwindled and disappeared. ⋯ Since modern cultures favour cognitive flexibility, 'immature' people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone of contemporary life: the greatest praise of an elderly person is to state that they retain the characteristics of youth. But the faults of youth are retained with well as its virtues: short attention span, sensation- and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness. Nonetheless, as health gets better and cosmetic technologies improve, future humans may become somewhat like an axolotl - the cave-dwelling salamander which retains its larval form until death.
-
Although 'hard work' and 'busyness' are somewhat similar terms, there seem to be significant differences in the way that they are used. While hard work has always been a feature of complex societies, modern society can be seen as evolving toward being dominated by jobs characterized by busyness. Busyness refers to multi-tasking - having many sequential jobs to perform and switching frequently between them on an externally-imposed schedule. ⋯ But busy jobs are hard to eliminate because they are those in which it is optimal for a variety of disparate and unpredictable tasks to be done by a single person. Consequently, those individuals who can cope with, even thrive-upon, busyness are becoming indispensable. In future 'the busy shall inherit the earth' (or, at least, the most powerful and highest paid jobs), not just in science but in all major social domains.