lpetrich
Contributor
Is Science Hitting a Wall?, Part 1 - Scientific American Blog Network Is Science Hitting a Wall?, Part 2 - Scientific American Blog Network
From the first one,
It may depend on what counts as a breakthrough. Could many breakthroughs be evident as breakthroughs well in retrospect?
Also, as author John Horgan notes, it could simply be that the easier stuff has already been done. Improved technology likely mitigates this problem, but apparently not enough.
The second one discusses how drug development has become more difficult:
In theoretical science, one could appoint a "Dead Ideas Officer", one that could come after the likes of Freudian psychoanalysis and string theory.
From the first one,
The Session was inspired in part by research suggesting that scientific progress is stagnating. In “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, four economists claim that “a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showthat research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.” The economists are Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones and Michael Webb of Stanford and John Van Reenen of MIT.
...
These findings corroborate analyses presented by economists Robert Gordon in The Rise and Fall of American Growth and Tyler Cowen in The Great Stagnation. Bloom, Jones, Webb and Van Reenen also cite “The Burden of Knowledge and the ‘Death of the Renaissance Man’: Is Innovation Getting Harder?”, a 2009 paper by Benjamin Jones. He presents evidence that would-be innovators require more training and specialization to reach the frontier of a given field. Research teams are also getting bigger, and the number of patents per researcher has declined.
The economists are concerned primarily with what I would call applied science, ... But their findings resonate with my claim in The End of Science that “pure” science—the effort simply to understand rather than manipulate nature--is bumping into limits.
It may depend on what counts as a breakthrough. Could many breakthroughs be evident as breakthroughs well in retrospect?
Also, as author John Horgan notes, it could simply be that the easier stuff has already been done. Improved technology likely mitigates this problem, but apparently not enough.
I think that those biologists are right. There is a big biological mystery that has yet to be solved: how organism development works. We have such tantalizing hints as Hox genes, but not much more.Some scientists at The Session scoffed at the idea of a scientific slowdown. Biologists, pointing to CRISPR, optogenetics and other advances, were adamant that the pace of discovery is, if anything, accelerating. My response: Yes, fields like genetics and neuroscience are indeed churning out findings, but to what end? Gene therapy has been an enormous disappointment, and treatments for mental illness remain appallingly primitive.
The second one discusses how drug development has become more difficult:
John Horgan mentions a solution: "Appoint Dead Drugs Officers." To see what went wrong in a drug-development failure.Eroom’s Law. The paper notes that “the number of new drugs approved per billion U.S. dollars spent on R&D has halved roughly every 9 years since 1950.”
The better than the Beatles problem.
The cautious regulator problem.
The throw money at it tendency.
The basic-research-brute force bias.
The devil is in the details problem.
In theoretical science, one could appoint a "Dead Ideas Officer", one that could come after the likes of Freudian psychoanalysis and string theory.