September 2, 2010
IF SCIENTISTS STILL BELIEVED IN THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD...:
Science’s dead end: Never has so much money poured into scientific research—yet the results add up to surprisingly little. Have we finally come to the end of what science can tell us? (James Le Fanu, 21st July 2010, Prospect)
[T]he best of times—but also the worst. Pose the question, What does it all add up to? and the answer, on reflection, seems surprisingly little—certainly compared to a century ago, when funding was an infinitesimal fraction of what it has become. In the first decade of the 20th century, Max Planck’s quantum and Einstein’s special theory of relativity would together rewrite the laws of physics; Ernest Rutherford described the structure of the atom and discovered gamma radiation; William Bateson rediscovered Mendel’s laws of genetic inheritance; and neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington described the “integrative action” of the brain and nervous system. The revolutionary significance of these and other discoveries were recognised at the time, but they also opened the door to many scientific advances over succeeding decades.By contrast, the comparable landmarks of the recent past have been rather disappointing. The cloning of a sheep generated much excitement but Dolly is now a stuffed exhibit in a Scottish museum and we are none the wiser for the subsequent cloning of dogs, cats and cows. It will no doubt be a similar story with Craig Venter’s recent creation of “artificial life.” Fabricating a basic toolkit of genes and inserting them into a bacterium—at a cost of $40m and ten years’ work—was technologically ingenious, but the result does less than what the simplest forms of life have been doing for free and in a matter of seconds for the past three billion years.
The practical applications of the massive commitment to genetic research, too, is scarcely detectable. The biotechnology business promised to transform both medicine and agriculture—but in the words of Arthur Levinson, chief executive of the pioneering biotechnology company Genentech, it has turned out to be “one of the biggest money-losing industries in the history of mankind.” There are promises that given 30, 40 or even 100 years all will become clear, that stem cell therapy will permit the blind to see and the lame to walk and we will have a theory of everything—or, as Stephen Hawking puts it, “know the mind of God.” But they remain promises.
More than a decade ago, John Horgan, a staff writer for Scientific American, proposed an explanation for the apparent inverse relationship between the current scale of research funding and scientific progress. The very success of science in the past, he argued in his book The End of Science (1996), radically constrains its prospects for the future. We live “in an era of diminishing returns.” Put simply, the last 60 years have witnessed a series of scientific discoveries that taken together rank among the greatest of all intellectual achievements, in permitting us for the first time to hold in our mind’s eye the entire history of the universe from its inception to yesterday.
...wouldn't the failure of modern scientific theories to yield any useful results -- cloning is, after all, just an outgrowth of Mendel's experiments -- suggest that rather than reaching the end of science they've just wandered into cul-de-sacs to await the next paradigm shifts?
