They never did. It seems like they did because we’re viewing science through a historical lens, and the Great Man filter. Nothing was ever discovered in some grand eureka moment. It’s always a slow grind of people building on each other’s work in small ways until useful applications start to trickle out. It’s like fog- when you’re in it, you can’t see it. But look to the horizon, and you can.
You just aren’t paying attention. Progress on curing many cancers has been huge. We’re hammering away at it and prognosis for every single cancer is orders of magnitude better than it was even ten or twenty years ago.
Alzheimer’s has made similar huge steps. Just recently some really game-changing drugs based on monoclonal antibodies were approved. In some cases, these new drugs are basically cures because they delay symptoms past your lifespan.
Again, you aren’t paying attention. Fusion power has gone from a hopeless fantasy to “hey we achieved ignition and netted positive power (not counting the support lasers and such)” in 50 years. That’s incredible.
You need to see the forest for the trees, friend. Science is doing great.
My mother died of cancer after years of painful and ineffective treatments and my father has advanced Alzheimer’s and my entire life has been repurposed towards his care. Trust me, I’m paying attention. Yes, there’s news about “extremely promising” treatments every few months. That’s been true my entire life. Somehow “extremely promising” is all they ever end up being, over and over and over again. I’m by no means saying that a cure only counts if it’s made by a single person in a eureka moment. But it does have to actually exist and be available, not just a “right around the corner!” hypothesis. Maybe this time, it really is right around the corner, but I’ve heard that song and dance too many times to put faith in it.
The breakthroughs we need aren’t the scientific kind-we know what needs to be done and mostly have the technology to manage it on the shelf. What we need is a breakthrough in political will that will focus on the issues in a tangible, cooperative way globally. Maybe if we could fake an imminent alien invasion that would pull humanity together.
Changes are happening, it’s just that they are so piecemeal and haphazard that they aren’t showing the results we need to see. Mostly humanity isn’t very good at changing before the problem is catastrophic.
I’m sorry for your losses and I’m sorry science isn’t moving fast enough for you, but your statement regarding science not progressing like it used to is just not accurate.
cancer medicine has been making progress… unfortunately it’s not all cancers. that there’s a vaccine against hpv caused cancers is huge. that we understand many of the common causes of lung cancer, and have done something is huge. people survive hodgkin’s ( or is non hodgkins, i always get that confused ) and breast cancer at much higher rates than previous
in this realm: aids went from untreatable to treatable and preventable which is amazing, and we’re getting through covid thanks to cutting edge techniques with rna
the world is a big place, bigger every day, and there’s a world of new understanding every day. not everything will be solvable, but maybe somethings can become better
AIDS is a good example, you’re right. That’s one of the few things that I can genuinely say went from a nightmare scenario to something much more manageable, all during my lifetime. It’s just that we’ve been promised so much more our entire lives. I don’t think it was done out of malice, just optimism, but repeatedly offering false hope and snatching it away when reality sinks in is cruel no matter how good the intentions. It’s hard to imagine a bright, utopian future for the first half of your life, and instead end up with a future where “Nazis are bad” is a controversial statement, animals like polar bears, tigers, elephants and whales may go extinct during your lifetime, and you’re probably going to die of the exact same illness that killed your father and grandfather. That doesn’t feel like progress to me in any meaningful way, but you and Veronica are also not wrong with the examples you give.
I want to be clear, I’m not saying scientists are lazy, or shouldn’t bother, or that the cures are being held back by big pharma conspiracies or anything along those lines. It’s more a mixture of despair at the backsliding of politics and culture, along with humanity’s failure to progress on big issues that are vital to our survival. Not for lack of trying, of course- just that sometimes it feels like we’ve spent decades determining what doesn’t work, and instead of all that effort leading to what does work, it just leads to “nothing will work, at least not before we’re all dead.”
yeah. don’t get me wrong. i see it as an entirely debatable question whether our developments as a whole have increased the common good or not. restraining some of our consumerism, wealth accumulation, etc. instead of enabling it might well have had much better outcomes than where we’re at.
i’d say we are learning a lot of science ( and yes absolutely there has been unsupported techno and medical optimism; some well meaning and some deliberately about profit. ) i do often wish we could be learning how to be better human beings instead… i hope we are doing so, but i don’t know that we are
I hate to always be saying this…but, also capitalism. Our science research is heavily influenced by profit, which warps what we pursue, causes people to announce things prematurely in order to attempt to secure a market position or exclusivity. Often when the research is funded by the government the spoils of that research still end up trapped behind private patents that go to the companies that benefitted from the government largess. It also makes companies decide that even if there is a medication known for something it’s not profitable enough to actually make it.
I think we have to figure this out if we want to see things improve
Also, as a side note, eureka moments still do exist, they are just all terrible. Licking your hand after spilling a baldness cure on it? Eureka! Saccharine! Figuring out that you can use math to bilk the suckers? Eureka! Bitcoin!
I’m guessing the premature release might also have something to do with securing rights to the discovery in case it turned out valid. Better to look foolish than to get beaten to the post by another lab.
(Edit to say other people said the same thing before me here, sorry to echo)
