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).
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).