How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation - Alexey Guzey

The 1970s were the high point for “vast amounts of theory applied to extremely small amounts of data,” as Paul Krugman put it to me. We had begun to use computers to produce models of the world, but it took us some time to recognize how crude and assumption laden they were, and that the precision that computers were capable of was no substitute for

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The extraordinary success of a few internet companies has masked the embarrassing lack of major breakthroughs in other domains. There has been little improvement in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, which affect nearly a third of all Americans over the age of eighty-five. There is still no cure for cancer. Life expectancy is... See more

Our slow growth is a puzzle. We have generated huge amounts of useful knowledge. We have made it easier and easier to access this knowledge from anywhere in the world. We have Jstor and Google Books to dig through existing knowledge, and easy data analysis with Excel. We can collaborate with people all over the world through Zoom and Slack. And mor... See more

The modern approach to medicine, which can broadly be characterized as reductionist, reveals itself clearly in scientism—an ill-named but important concept. The concept of scientism was introduced by 20th-century economist Friedrich Hayek.4 He observed that, too often, the methods and language of science are imitated by institutions and systems not

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