As a datapoint, the more I learn about bio, especially recent-ish stuff (past 1-5 decades), I’m more like “the whole “The Great Stagnation” thing was basically bullshit”:
DNA sequencing in any form has only existed for about half a century.
Before the 21st century, we hadn’t sequenced 1 human genome.
IDK why this isn’t felt so intuitively. Maybe it’s just kinda opaque. People notice “hey the mRNA vaccines were developed really fast, that’s weird/cool” but don’t know about the vastness of the field. There’s plenty of popular “science news” but it is somehow assumed to be unreal / fictional. Maybe because clickbait.
This is going to be transformative on slower scales than other tech because medicine and reprogenetics is inherently slower (slow experiments, more caution, more regulation, more difficult problems) compared to, like, making vehicles. But it’s one of those overestimating short-term change / underestimating long-term change things, probably.
None of these advancements have direct impacts on most people’s day-to-day lives.
In contrast, the difference between “I’ve heard of cars, but they’re play things for the rich” and “my family owns a car”, is transformative for individuals and societies.
At least in the 21st century, new internal combustion engine technologies exhibit high reproducibility and low verification costs. There are no large numbers of internal combustion engine specialists employing various means to generate false or selectively filtered test reports for personal gain. Consequently, no engine configuration used in automotive development has been found fundamentally impossible.
Automobiles are not regulated by a group of accident experts with questionable ties to automotive giants and overly strict automotive ethicists. Consequently, a vehicle cannot be banned for violating some aspect of so-called automotive ethics. New cars also do not require decades of randomized controlled trials involving thousands of participants to gain market approval—costs that smaller automotive companies could never afford.
Driving a car is not regarded as a qualification requiring years of costly university education, but rather as a right enjoyed by all who undergo basic training. The thousands who die annually in car accidents are not perceived as a catastrophic failure of automobiles, compelling society to pressure for their elimination.
Society does not view automobiles as solely for transporting patients. Not every attempt to use cars for faster mobility faces resistance, suspicion from licensed drivers well-versed in automotive ethics, or sparks conspiracy-tinged debates about social equity and the value of life. On the contrary, people have the right to drive to most places they wish to go—provided roads exist and traffic restrictions do not apply.
Of course, there are also virtually no automotive conspiracy theories claiming that only divinely granted legs are suitable for transportation, advocating water as a fuel substitute, or declaring that adding trace amounts of explosives to fuel tanks can achieve any desired speed.
Really? Maybe, I’m not sure. Did you check? If you add up vaccines developed in the last 50 years, times the number of illness / damage they’ve prevented, what do you get? What about other medical treatments? What about food production downstream of GMOs? Etc.
Speculatively introducing a hypothesis: It’s easier to notice a difference like
N years ago, we didn’t have X. Now that we have X, our life has been completely restructured. (Xϵ{car, PC, etc.})
than
N years ago, people sometimes died of some disease that is very rare / easily preventable now, but mostly everyone lived their lives mostly the same way.
I.e., introducing some X that causes ripples restructuring a big aspect of human life, vs introducing some X that removes an undesirable thing.
I wonder if it’s a thing where it’s taking a while for those things to hit. Like, mRNA vaccines are only a couple of years old, GLP-1RAs are in a gradual process of being rolled out, etc. If I think of the category of “awesome newish bio stuff I’d like to use”, it seems like most of it becomes widely available to consumers in the near future or last 5 years, with the exception of statins.
Right, I think bio stuff is slower and involves somewhat deeper science. (Compared to car manufacturing, in some sense, maybe. Though it’s hard to say / unclear what the question is, because you have deep stuff with chip manufacturing, and special alloys, and so on; but I think bio has much more prerequisite scientific richness to its big advances). Because it’s slower and deeper, it’s more opaque (i.e. harder to do credit assignment).
I think it’s not just that it’s slower/deeper: my personal sense (which might be just a thing of not requiring much medical care between the ages of 5 and 30) is that the pace at which awesome new stuff is happening in medicines I can buy got much faster in the last few years. If my perception is right, it seems like that requires some explanation of “bio is slower/deeper and also 40 years ago there was a massive breakthru that took 40 years to percolate”, and not just “bio is slower/deeper”.
Well, to really evaluate this I’d want to see some sort of thorough-ish investigation, that tries to think of most of the main ways that bio would have been impacting people’s lives, and checking the timescales for the prerequisite research. It’s not something I’d update very much about, based on anecdata, because it’s too big of a question.
Drug approvals have gone up in recent years: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10856271/ (figure 1). Of course most of those are not ones that you’ll encounter in day-to-day life. Meanwhile, some of the most commonly used over-the-counter drugs from previous decades have been pulled from the market or made harder to get (cold medicine particularly: phenylpropanolamine due to rare side effects in 2000, oral phenylephrine due to lack of effect last year, and pseudoephedrine restricted to behind the counter due to use in meth a decade ago or so).
My guess is that the big difference in the speed of biotech compared to early-20th-century-advancements is the relative conservatism of the medical field, and the money & time-consuming certifications you need to get before releasing anything to market. This, in my view, is much less a function of the science, and much more a function of the sociology around the science.
I imagine that’s one relevant thing going on, but also I think the actual science has a lot more depth. The progress I listed doesn’t seem like it’s going slower due to medical regulation.
The progress I listed doesn’t seem like it’s going slower due to medical regulation.
I mean the basic research aspect sure (except for stem cells), but applications of each of the progress areas you listed basically involve either clinical applications or selling GMOs. Both of which have very bad regulatory bottlenecks, especially from a world-wide perspective.
There has been, as you mention, enormous progress in bio-tech and our broader understanding of biology in the past 50 years, but comparatively little application of that knowledge. This is not what you would expect if the science is “deep” but applications easy. How exactly does the progress you listed support this conclusion?
Yeah, as I mentioned in my earlier comment bio stuff is:
inherently slower (slow experiments, more caution, more regulation, more difficult problems)
So yeah I agree applications are also difficult. One thing I’m trying to say is “the progress of bio feels slower in significant part because the science itself is difficult, and is actually slower in a sense, but this is a confusing way to view it because there has also been a large amount of scientific progress; so it’s slower in some sense of being less progress per time relative to the total difficulty of the field, i.e. we’re still mostly confused and mostly powerless in the domain of bio; but the absolute quantity of knowledge and power we’ve gained is large; but people don’t appreciate that; partly that’s because the applications are separately harder and slower, and maybe partly that’s because it’s harder / less legible to attribute the applications to the font of deep progress”.
I agree there’s been a lot of scientific progress, and real GDP per capita, which is maybe the most canonical single metric, continues to rise steadily.
But yeah, I think that this feels underwhelming to people compared to earlier qualitative changes. I think this is some combination of them noting that tech advances affect their lives less, and the tech advances feeling more opaque.
Very, very few people are at all about scientific accomplishments unless it’s directly affecting somebody they personally care about, and particularly themselves or their kids. The technical accomplishments you list are in fundamental bio or medical innovations that have so far only affected a small number of individuals, so for the time being, virtually nobody will care about them. The reality is that turning the technical accomplishments you list into safe and effect medicines ready for doctors to give to patients have been extremely time consuming, expensive, and limited in scope, or have not yet resulted in bona fide medical breakthroughs in humans.
In biology, innovations in earlier times (vaccines and antibiotics) were cheap, saved a lot more young people and prevented more common and deadly illnesses. mRNA vaccines and gene editing are applicable to much smaller numbers of people, often in more distant countries, often primarily benefitting older people with comorbidities. You can see this in tapering off of lifespan, the growing gap between lifespan and healthspan, and the rising cost of medical care.
You can also see it in the exceptions—how GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide (ozempic), which benefitted numerous young people in the first word in a very tangible way—provoked much more news coverage, popular awareness, and grassroots optimism about progress in this domain, as well as populist anger at high prices, limited availability, worries about side effects, and so on.
I think we will see similar excitement if substantial strides are made in bringing down IVF costs, improving fertility for women in their late 30s and beyond, and ability to predict and prevent or terminate pregnancies when the fetus is expected to show profound autism or other serious cognitive impairments; widespread deployment of xenotransplantation (pig kidneys transplanted into humans), drastically improving antipsychotics or treatments for substance abuse, and continued improvements to GLP-1 agonists and potentially other drugs performing related functions based on insights gained from initial success.
We will also see improvements in the US health situation if congress increases the number of funded residency positions so that we can expand the doctor workforce, as well as through expansion of telehealth. But given everything that’s going on, I think this is unlikely in the near term future.
As a datapoint, the more I learn about bio, especially recent-ish stuff (past 1-5 decades), I’m more like “the whole “The Great Stagnation” thing was basically bullshit”:
DNA sequencing in any form has only existed for about half a century.
Before the 21st century, we hadn’t sequenced 1 human genome.
Only in the past 5ish years do we have millions of whole genomes (or 10ish years if you count SNP arrays; see https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/How_many_human_genomes_have_been_sequenced_.html), and the resulting polygenic scores (now including thousands of alleles for dozens of traits).
Epigenomic sequencing (RNA sequencing, methylation sequencing, chromatin accessibility sequencing, spatial sequencing) is a decade old.
Embryonic stem cells? Isolated <50 years ago.
Turning non-stem cells into stem cells? 21st century.
Serious de novo DNA synthesis (more than a few base pairs)? <50 years old.
Megabase synthetic chromosome (stitched together): 2010ish (https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0521/J.-Craig-Venter-Institute-creates-first-synthetic-life-form).
Mouse gametogenesis? Past decade-ish.
CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing? Past 2 decades.
CRISPR epigenetic editing? Past decade.
Etc.
IDK why this isn’t felt so intuitively. Maybe it’s just kinda opaque. People notice “hey the mRNA vaccines were developed really fast, that’s weird/cool” but don’t know about the vastness of the field. There’s plenty of popular “science news” but it is somehow assumed to be unreal / fictional. Maybe because clickbait.
This is going to be transformative on slower scales than other tech because medicine and reprogenetics is inherently slower (slow experiments, more caution, more regulation, more difficult problems) compared to, like, making vehicles. But it’s one of those overestimating short-term change / underestimating long-term change things, probably.
None of these advancements have direct impacts on most people’s day-to-day lives.
In contrast, the difference between “I’ve heard of cars, but they’re play things for the rich” and “my family owns a car”, is transformative for individuals and societies.
At least in the 21st century, new internal combustion engine technologies exhibit high reproducibility and low verification costs. There are no large numbers of internal combustion engine specialists employing various means to generate false or selectively filtered test reports for personal gain. Consequently, no engine configuration used in automotive development has been found fundamentally impossible.
Automobiles are not regulated by a group of accident experts with questionable ties to automotive giants and overly strict automotive ethicists. Consequently, a vehicle cannot be banned for violating some aspect of so-called automotive ethics. New cars also do not require decades of randomized controlled trials involving thousands of participants to gain market approval—costs that smaller automotive companies could never afford.
Driving a car is not regarded as a qualification requiring years of costly university education, but rather as a right enjoyed by all who undergo basic training. The thousands who die annually in car accidents are not perceived as a catastrophic failure of automobiles, compelling society to pressure for their elimination.
Society does not view automobiles as solely for transporting patients. Not every attempt to use cars for faster mobility faces resistance, suspicion from licensed drivers well-versed in automotive ethics, or sparks conspiracy-tinged debates about social equity and the value of life. On the contrary, people have the right to drive to most places they wish to go—provided roads exist and traffic restrictions do not apply.
Of course, there are also virtually no automotive conspiracy theories claiming that only divinely granted legs are suitable for transportation, advocating water as a fuel substitute, or declaring that adding trace amounts of explosives to fuel tanks can achieve any desired speed.
Really? Maybe, I’m not sure. Did you check? If you add up vaccines developed in the last 50 years, times the number of illness / damage they’ve prevented, what do you get? What about other medical treatments? What about food production downstream of GMOs? Etc.
Speculatively introducing a hypothesis: It’s easier to notice a difference like
than
I.e., introducing some X that causes ripples restructuring a big aspect of human life, vs introducing some X that removes an undesirable thing.
Relatedly, people systematically overlook subtractive changes.
I wonder if it’s a thing where it’s taking a while for those things to hit. Like, mRNA vaccines are only a couple of years old, GLP-1RAs are in a gradual process of being rolled out, etc. If I think of the category of “awesome newish bio stuff I’d like to use”, it seems like most of it becomes widely available to consumers in the near future or last 5 years, with the exception of statins.
Right, I think bio stuff is slower and involves somewhat deeper science. (Compared to car manufacturing, in some sense, maybe. Though it’s hard to say / unclear what the question is, because you have deep stuff with chip manufacturing, and special alloys, and so on; but I think bio has much more prerequisite scientific richness to its big advances). Because it’s slower and deeper, it’s more opaque (i.e. harder to do credit assignment).
I think it’s not just that it’s slower/deeper: my personal sense (which might be just a thing of not requiring much medical care between the ages of 5 and 30) is that the pace at which awesome new stuff is happening in medicines I can buy got much faster in the last few years. If my perception is right, it seems like that requires some explanation of “bio is slower/deeper and also 40 years ago there was a massive breakthru that took 40 years to percolate”, and not just “bio is slower/deeper”.
Well, to really evaluate this I’d want to see some sort of thorough-ish investigation, that tries to think of most of the main ways that bio would have been impacting people’s lives, and checking the timescales for the prerequisite research. It’s not something I’d update very much about, based on anecdata, because it’s too big of a question.
Drug approvals have gone up in recent years: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10856271/ (figure 1). Of course most of those are not ones that you’ll encounter in day-to-day life. Meanwhile, some of the most commonly used over-the-counter drugs from previous decades have been pulled from the market or made harder to get (cold medicine particularly: phenylpropanolamine due to rare side effects in 2000, oral phenylephrine due to lack of effect last year, and pseudoephedrine restricted to behind the counter due to use in meth a decade ago or so).
My guess is that the big difference in the speed of biotech compared to early-20th-century-advancements is the relative conservatism of the medical field, and the money & time-consuming certifications you need to get before releasing anything to market. This, in my view, is much less a function of the science, and much more a function of the sociology around the science.
I imagine that’s one relevant thing going on, but also I think the actual science has a lot more depth. The progress I listed doesn’t seem like it’s going slower due to medical regulation.
I mean the basic research aspect sure (except for stem cells), but applications of each of the progress areas you listed basically involve either clinical applications or selling GMOs. Both of which have very bad regulatory bottlenecks, especially from a world-wide perspective.
There has been, as you mention, enormous progress in bio-tech and our broader understanding of biology in the past 50 years, but comparatively little application of that knowledge. This is not what you would expect if the science is “deep” but applications easy. How exactly does the progress you listed support this conclusion?
Yeah, as I mentioned in my earlier comment bio stuff is:
So yeah I agree applications are also difficult. One thing I’m trying to say is “the progress of bio feels slower in significant part because the science itself is difficult, and is actually slower in a sense, but this is a confusing way to view it because there has also been a large amount of scientific progress; so it’s slower in some sense of being less progress per time relative to the total difficulty of the field, i.e. we’re still mostly confused and mostly powerless in the domain of bio; but the absolute quantity of knowledge and power we’ve gained is large; but people don’t appreciate that; partly that’s because the applications are separately harder and slower, and maybe partly that’s because it’s harder / less legible to attribute the applications to the font of deep progress”.
I agree there’s been a lot of scientific progress, and real GDP per capita, which is maybe the most canonical single metric, continues to rise steadily.
But yeah, I think that this feels underwhelming to people compared to earlier qualitative changes. I think this is some combination of them noting that tech advances affect their lives less, and the tech advances feeling more opaque.
Very, very few people are at all about scientific accomplishments unless it’s directly affecting somebody they personally care about, and particularly themselves or their kids. The technical accomplishments you list are in fundamental bio or medical innovations that have so far only affected a small number of individuals, so for the time being, virtually nobody will care about them. The reality is that turning the technical accomplishments you list into safe and effect medicines ready for doctors to give to patients have been extremely time consuming, expensive, and limited in scope, or have not yet resulted in bona fide medical breakthroughs in humans.
In biology, innovations in earlier times (vaccines and antibiotics) were cheap, saved a lot more young people and prevented more common and deadly illnesses. mRNA vaccines and gene editing are applicable to much smaller numbers of people, often in more distant countries, often primarily benefitting older people with comorbidities. You can see this in tapering off of lifespan, the growing gap between lifespan and healthspan, and the rising cost of medical care.
You can also see it in the exceptions—how GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide (ozempic), which benefitted numerous young people in the first word in a very tangible way—provoked much more news coverage, popular awareness, and grassroots optimism about progress in this domain, as well as populist anger at high prices, limited availability, worries about side effects, and so on.
I think we will see similar excitement if substantial strides are made in bringing down IVF costs, improving fertility for women in their late 30s and beyond, and ability to predict and prevent or terminate pregnancies when the fetus is expected to show profound autism or other serious cognitive impairments; widespread deployment of xenotransplantation (pig kidneys transplanted into humans), drastically improving antipsychotics or treatments for substance abuse, and continued improvements to GLP-1 agonists and potentially other drugs performing related functions based on insights gained from initial success.
We will also see improvements in the US health situation if congress increases the number of funded residency positions so that we can expand the doctor workforce, as well as through expansion of telehealth. But given everything that’s going on, I think this is unlikely in the near term future.