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Does Science Still Progress?
Why a new metaphysics might be necessary.
“The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
Some diagnoses are terrifying. They hit with the force of a sledgehammer. On an early morning, I sat next to my partner in the waiting room of the hospital’s neurosurgery department. A routine MRI scan 3 weeks earlier showed a tumor festering between the frontal lobes of her brain. We felt exhausted, thinking compulsively through all possible what-if scenarios.
People around us fidgeted endlessly with print-outs of diagnostic reports while others stared with ragged looks into a void of despair. Holding her hand, I thought about the impotence of science in curing the scourge of cancer. Progress over the past decades seemed incremental at best but never transformational.
I pondered whether cancer research met its limits.
In 1971, US President Nixon declared what came to be known as The War on Cancer in his State of the Union Speech. In 2012, an estimated 1.6 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer, and 600,000 died despite over 200 billion USD in federal spending on cancer research since Nixon’s declaration. That amount does not even consider what the pharmaceutical industry invested in related R&D.
