Betting Against Progress Turns Out Poorly, But Can Work in the Short Term in a Slow Field

Setting oneself up as a spokesperson for "we will not achieve this goal", as the fellow noted here is choosing to do, is a bet against technological progress. A glance at any few decade period in the past two hundred years suggests that such a bet will almost certainly fail in time, sometimes quite rapidly. In highly regulated fields that move as slowly as is the case for medicine, however, one can profitably continue to be a skeptic for quite some time. While progress is rapid and impressive in the lab and in animal studies, a skeptic can continue to shrug and point to the lack of human therapies. This is the result of an excessive burden of regulatory cost: rapid progress in the lab, in a revolutionary era of increasing capacity, improving tools, and falling costs, runs up against a wall of regulatory delay and vast expense. It takes twenty years to move from early research to mode of therapy to clinical approval, and few programs make it all the way, abandoned in the face of a cost that no-one is willing to pay. All skeptics setting themselves up in general opposition to technological progress will look silly at some point, it just takes longer when the state has decided that progress in a given field will be slow and burdened. When selective and intelligent, skepticism serves a useful purpose, as every grand endeavor, every new field will attract a problematic minority of the fraudulent, the mistaken, the grandiose, and the rent-seekers. There certainly exis...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs