The more you learn about these stories, the more you realize that our world is just a giant clusterfuck. We haven't witnessed many revolutionary medical breakthroughs in recent years or even decades. With little resources back then scientists were still able to invent breakthroughs such as vaccines, anesthesia, antibiotics, etc. Consider all the money being dumped into medical research field today, it's disheartening that we haven't been able to achieve anything near the same level. The returns are quickly diminishing.
The medical field seems to progress at much slower pace compared to other fields like computer science. Are we facing talents distribution problem? The world certainly didn't have companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook back then. Are these tech companies sucking up most talents? It's sad to imagine our brightest people are being utilized to create more online ads rather than help curing the world.
"It was a good description to say that it was a game, a very interesting game one could play. Whenever one solved one of the little problems, one could write a paper about it. It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since then. It is very difficult now for a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work." P.A.M. Dirac.
The quote is about physics, but it certainly also applies to medicine. All the low hanging fruits have been picked. The problem now is not the lack of talent, funding, interest or dedication: it's the lack of fruits.
To continue the analogy: The amount of reachable fruit depends a lot on the availability of tools. That’s why we didn’t have computer science in the copper age. There have a lot of new tools been developed recently, eg deep learning, and new areas of expertise have been unlocked with it. One just has to figure out what kinds of fruit are reachable now.
There are some breakthroughs but they are taken for granted. Differences with low hanging fruit aside. It isn't simply 'hey this slide I forgot to clean before vacation is growing something that is killing bacteria' level. Not to disparage the past groundbreaking work at all but what they had more accessible discoveries. While Salk is rightfully lauded for his role in producing the polio vaccine its manufacture was relatively simple in that it involved monkey kidney tissue grown three strains of viruses inactivated with formaldehyde. Not easy but straightforward in approach. Now the therapies are far more complex and involve things like gene sequencing and molecular biology.
We have a hepatitis C cure for one and there are other more subtle advances. We have a HPV vaccine although its rollout was sadly more limited than it should have been out of prudishness. Another more subtle example involves pediatric surgery. Before congenital heart problems were always inoperable because infants were too small to operate on. Now it is possible to do surgeries in the womb.
The medical field seems to progress at much slower pace compared to other fields like computer science. Are we facing talents distribution problem? The world certainly didn't have companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook back then. Are these tech companies sucking up most talents? It's sad to imagine our brightest people are being utilized to create more online ads rather than help curing the world.